The famed Morris worm in 1988 used this as one of its attack techniques. Buffers are widespread in operating system (OS) code, so it is possible to make attacks that perform privilege escalation and gain unlimited access to the computer's resources. By sending in data designed to cause a buffer overflow, it is possible to write into areas known to hold executable code and replace it with malicious code, or to selectively overwrite data pertaining to the program's state, therefore causing behavior that was not intended by the original programmer. On many systems, the memory layout of a program, or the system as a whole, is well defined. If this overwrites adjacent data or executable code, this may result in erratic program behavior, including memory access errors, incorrect results, and crashes.Įxploiting the behavior of a buffer overflow is a well-known security exploit. Buffer overflows can often be triggered by malformed inputs if one assumes all inputs will be smaller than a certain size and the buffer is created to be that size, then an anomalous transaction that produces more data could cause it to write past the end of the buffer. 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.īuffers are areas of memory set aside to hold data, often while moving it from one section of a program to another, or between programs. Data is written into A, but is too large to fit within A, so it overflows into B. Anomaly in computer security and programming Visualization of a software buffer overflow.
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