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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:
Null-terminated string. In computer programming, a null-terminated string is a character string stored as an array containing the characters and terminated with a null character (a character with an internal value of zero, called "NUL" in this article, not same as the glyph zero). Alternative names are C string, which refers to the C ...
where a is an array object, the function randomInt(x) chooses a random integer between 1 and x, inclusive, and swapEntries(i, j) swaps the ith and jth entries in the array. In the preceding example, 52 is a magic number. It is considered better programming style to write the following:
Win32 Thread Information Block. The Thread Information Block (TIB) or Thread Environment Block (TEB) is a data structure in Win32 on x86 that stores information about the currently running thread. It descended from, and is backward-compatible on 32-bit systems with, a similar structure in OS/2. [1]
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.
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]