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Stack buffer overflow. 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. [1][2] Stack buffer overflow bugs are caused when a program writes more data to a buffer located on the ...
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.
Here is an example of ANSI C code that will generally cause a segmentation fault on platforms with memory protection. It attempts to modify a string literal, which is undefined behavior according to the ANSI C standard. Most compilers will not catch this at compile time, and instead compile this to executable code that will crash:
Off-by-one errors are common in using the C library because it is not consistent with respect to whether one needs to subtract 1 byte – functions like fgets() and strncpy will never write past the length given them (fgets() subtracts 1 itself, and only retrieves (length − 1) bytes), whereas others, like strncat will write past the length given them.
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.
A string is generally considered as a data type and is often implemented as an array data structure of bytes (or words) that stores a sequence of elements, typically characters, using some character encoding. String may also denote more general arrays or other sequence (or list) data types and structures.
Definitions. A string is defined as a contiguous sequence of code units terminated by the first zero code unit (often called the NUL code unit). [1] This means a string cannot contain the zero code unit, as the first one seen marks the end of the string. The length of a string is the number of code units before the zero code unit. [1]
Stack (abstract data type) Similarly to a stack of plates, adding or removing is only practical at the top. Simple representation of a stack runtime with push and pop operations. In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements with two main operations: Push, which adds an element to the collection, and.