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A heap overflow, heap overrun, or heap smashing is a type of buffer overflow that occurs in the heap data area. Heap overflows are exploitable in a different manner to that of stack-based overflows. Memory on the heap is dynamically allocated at runtime and typically contains program 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.
Heap sprays take advantage of the fact that on most architectures and operating systems, the start location of large heap allocations is predictable and consecutive allocations are roughly sequential. This means that the sprayed heap will roughly be in the same location each and every time the heap spray is run.
When Data Execution Prevention is enabled to forbid any execute access to the stack, the attacker can still use the overwritten return address (the instruction pointer) to point to data in a code segment (.text on Linux) or every other executable section of the program. The goal is to reuse existing code.
For example, the Rust programming language implements a borrow checker to ensure memory safety, [12] while C and C++ provide no memory safety guarantees. The substantial amount of software written in C and C++ has motivated the development of external static analysis tools like Coverity , which offers static memory analysis for C. [ 13 ]
The original Java memory model developed in 1995, was widely perceived as broken, [1] preventing many runtime optimizations and not providing strong enough guarantees for code safety. It was updated through the Java Community Process, as Java Specification Request 133 (JSR-133), which took effect back in 2004, for Tiger (Java 5.0). [2] [3]
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.
This shows the typical layout of a simple computer's program memory with the text, various data, and stack and heap sections. The data segment contains initialized static variables, i.e. global variables and local static variables which have a defined value and can be modified.