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Buffer overflow is one of the most common programming flaws exploited by computer viruses, causing serious computer security issues (e.g. return-to-libc attack, stack-smashing protection) in widely used programs. In some cases programs can also incorrectly access the memory before the start of a buffer.
A code sanitizer is a programming tool that detects bugs in the form of undefined or suspicious behavior by a compiler inserting instrumentation code at runtime. The class of tools was first introduced by Google's AddressSanitizer (or ASan) of 2012, which uses directly mapped shadow memory to detect memory corruption such as buffer overflows or accesses to a dangling pointer (use-after-free).
Canaries or canary words or stack cookies are known values that are placed between a buffer and control data on the stack to monitor buffer overflows. When the buffer overflows, the first data to be corrupted will usually be the canary, and a failed verification of the canary data will therefore alert of an overflow, which can then be handled, for example, by invalidating the corrupted data.
Memory errors were first considered in the context of resource management (computing) and time-sharing systems, in an effort to avoid problems such as fork bombs. [4] Developments were mostly theoretical until the Morris worm, which exploited a buffer overflow in fingerd. [5]
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.
Buffer overflow; Memory management; Memory debugger; Plumbr is a popular memory leak detection tool for applications running on Java Virtual Machine. nmon (short for Nigel's Monitor) is a popular system monitor tool for the AIX and Linux operating systems.
Segmentation faults can also occur independently of page faults: illegal access to a valid page is a segmentation fault, but not an invalid page fault, and segmentation faults can occur in the middle of a page (hence no page fault), for example in a buffer overflow that stays within a page but illegally overwrites memory.
They may also be caused by programming errors alone. Buffer over-reads can result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, a crash, or a breach of system security. Thus, they are the basis of many software vulnerabilities and can be maliciously exploited to access privileged information. [citation needed]