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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.
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 ...
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 .
Generally, these types of attacks arise when an adversary manipulates the call stack by taking advantage of a bug in the program, often a buffer overrun. In a buffer overrun, a function that does not perform proper bounds checking before storing user-provided data into memory will accept more input data than it can store properly. If the data ...
Developments were mostly theoretical until the Morris worm, which exploited a buffer overflow in fingerd. [5] The field of computer security developed quickly thereafter, escalating with multitudes of new attacks such as the return-to-libc attack and defense techniques such as the non-executable stack [6] and address space layout randomization.
A "return-to-libc" attack is a computer security attack usually starting with a buffer overflow in which a subroutine return address on a call stack is replaced by an address of a subroutine that is already present in the process executable memory, bypassing the no-execute bit feature (if present) and ridding the attacker of the need to inject their own code.
The worm spreads by exploiting a buffer overflow discovered by the Polish security research group Last Stage of Delirium [5] in the DCOM RPC service on the affected operating systems, for which a patch had been released one month earlier in MS03-026 [6] (CVE-2003-0352) and later in MS03-039. [7]
The program exploited a buffer overflow bug in Microsoft's SQL Server and Desktop Engine database products. Although the MS02-039 (CVE-2002-0649) [2] patch had been released six months earlier, many organizations had not yet applied it. The most infected regions were Europe, North America, and Asia (including East Asia and India). [3]