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Stack-smashing protection is unable to protect against certain forms of attack. For example, it cannot protect against buffer overflows in the heap. There is no sane way to alter the layout of data within a structure; structures are expected to be the same between modules, especially with shared libraries. Any data in a structure after a buffer ...
An accidental overflow may result in data corruption or unexpected behavior by any process that accesses the affected memory area. On operating systems without memory protection, this could be any process on the system. For example, a Microsoft JPEG GDI+ buffer overflow vulnerability could allow remote execution of code on the affected machine. [1]
Visualization of a software buffer overflow. Data is written into A, but is too large to fit within A, so it overflows into B.. In programming and information security, a buffer overflow or buffer overrun is an anomaly whereby a program writes data to a buffer beyond the buffer's allocated memory, overwriting adjacent memory locations.
Developments were mostly theoretical until the Morris worm, which exploited a buffer overflow in fingerd. [5] The field of computer security developed quickly thereafter, escalating with multitudes of new attacks such as the return-to-libc attack and defense techniques such as the non-executable stack [6] and address space layout randomization.
Until the late 1990s, major operating systems did not offer any protection against these attacks; Microsoft Windows provided no buffer-overrun protections until 2004. [5] Eventually, operating systems began to combat the exploitation of buffer overflow bugs by marking the memory where data is written as non-executable, a technique known as ...
In computer security, a shadow stack is a mechanism for protecting a procedure's stored return address, [1] such as from a stack buffer overflow. The shadow stack itself is a second, separate stack that "shadows" the program call stack. In the function prologue, a function stores its return address to both the call stack and the shadow stack.
This helps to prevent certain buffer overflow exploits from succeeding, particularly those that inject and execute code, such as the Sasser and Blaster worms. These attacks rely on some part of memory, usually the stack, being both writable and executable; if it is not, the attack fails.
Address space layout randomization (ASLR) is a computer security technique involved in preventing exploitation of memory corruption vulnerabilities. [1] In order to prevent an attacker from reliably redirecting code execution to, for example, a particular exploited function in memory, ASLR randomly arranges the address space positions of key data areas of a process, including the base of the ...