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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 .
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.
[a] Thus, a signed 32-bit integer can only represent integer values from −(2 31) to 2 31 − 1 inclusive. Consequently, if a signed 32-bit integer is used to store Unix time, the latest time that can be stored is 2 31 − 1 (2,147,483,647) seconds after epoch, which is 03:14:07 on Tuesday, 19 January 2038. [7]
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.
A buffer overflow; A stack overflow; Attempting to execute a program that does not compile correctly. (Some compilers [which?] will output an executable file despite the presence of compile-time errors.) In C code, segmentation faults most often occur because of errors in pointer use, particularly in C dynamic memory allocation.
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 ...
UCHAR_MAX, USHRT_MAX, UINT_MAX, ULONG_MAX, ULLONG_MAX(C99) – maximum possible value of unsigned integer types: unsigned char, unsigned short, unsigned int, unsigned long, unsigned long long; CHAR_MIN – minimum possible value of char; CHAR_MAX – maximum possible value of char; MB_LEN_MAX – maximum number of bytes in a multibyte character