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A stack buffer overflow can be caused deliberately as part of an attack known as stack smashing. If the affected program is running with special privileges, or accepts data from untrusted network hosts (e.g. a webserver ) then the bug is a potential security vulnerability .
The stack is often used to store variables of fixed length local to the currently active functions. Programmers may further choose to explicitly use the stack to store local data of variable length. If a region of memory lies on the thread's stack, that memory is said to have been allocated on the stack, i.e. stack-based memory allocation (SBMA).
Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website for computer programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network . [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] It was created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky .
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. Buffers are areas of memory set aside to hold data, often while moving it from one section of a program to another, or between programs.
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.
Larger allocations may also increase the risk of undefined behavior due to a stack overflow. [41] C99 offered variable-length arrays as an alternative stack allocation mechanism – however, this feature was relegated to optional in the later C11 standard. POSIX defines a function posix_memalign that allocates memory with caller-specified ...
To expose dangling pointer errors, one common programming technique is to set pointers to the null pointer or to an invalid address once the storage they point to has been released. When the null pointer is dereferenced (in most languages) the program will immediately terminate—there is no potential for data corruption or unpredictable behavior.
The application programming interface (API) function TlsAlloc can be used to obtain an unused TLS slot index; the TLS slot index will then be considered 'used'.. The TlsGetValue and TlsSetValue functions are then used to read and write a memory address to a thread-local variable identified by the TLS slot index.