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In software, a stack buffer overflow or stack buffer overrun occurs when a program writes to a memory address on the program's call stack outside of the intended data structure, which is usually a fixed-length buffer.
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.
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.
A write buffer is a type of data buffer that can be used to hold data being written from the cache to main memory or to the next cache in the memory hierarchy to improve performance and reduce latency.
Allocating more memory on the stack than is available can result in a crash due to stack overflow. This is also why functions that use alloca are usually prevented from being inlined: [ 2 ] should such a function be inlined into a loop, the caller would suffer from an unanticipated growth in stack usage, making an overflow much more likely.
Stack overflow may also refer to: Stack buffer overflow , when a program writes to a memory address on the program's call stack outside of the intended data structure; usually a fixed length buffer Stack Overflow , a question-and-answer website on the topic of computer programming
If a push operation causes the stack pointer to increment or decrement beyond the maximum extent of the stack, a stack overflow occurs. Some environments that rely heavily on stacks may provide additional operations, for example: Duplicate: the top item is popped and then pushed twice, such that two copies of the former top item now lie at the top.
In 2019, a Microsoft security engineer reported that 70% of all security vulnerabilities were caused by memory safety issues. [7] In 2020, a team at Google similarly reported that 70% of all "severe security bugs" in Chromium were caused by memory safety problems.