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Integer overflow can be demonstrated through an odometer overflowing, a mechanical version of the phenomenon. All digits are set to the maximum 9 and the next increment of the white digit causes a cascade of carry-over additions setting all digits to 0, but there is no higher digit (1,000,000s digit) to change to a 1, so the counter resets to zero.
Buffer overflow protection is any of various techniques used during software development to enhance the security of executable programs by detecting buffer overflows on stack-allocated variables, and preventing them from causing program misbehavior or from becoming serious security vulnerabilities. A stack buffer overflow occurs when a program ...
There is no universal solution for the Year 2038 problem. For example, in the C language, any change to the definition of the time_t data type would result in code-compatibility problems in any application in which date and time representations are dependent on the nature of the signed 32-bit time_t integer.
Stack canaries, named for their analogy to a canary in a coal mine, are used to detect a stack buffer overflow before execution of malicious code can occur. This method works by placing a small integer, the value of which is randomly chosen at program start, in memory just before the stack return pointer.
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.
The widespread implementation of data execution prevention made traditional buffer overflow vulnerabilities difficult or impossible to exploit in the manner described above. Instead, an attacker was restricted to code already in memory marked executable, such as the program code itself and any linked shared libraries .
Like buffer-overflow bugs, dangling/wild pointer bugs frequently become security holes. For example, if the pointer is used to make a virtual function call, a different address (possibly pointing at exploit code) may be called due to the vtable pointer being overwritten. Alternatively, if the pointer is used for writing to memory, some other ...
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too