Ready to be published? LXer is read by around 350,000 individuals each month, and is an excellent place for you to publish your ideas, thoughts, reviews, complaints, etc. Do you have something to say to the Linux community?
In this paper we are going to describe a kind of vulnerability that is known in the literature but also poor documented. In fact, the problem that is going to be analyzed can be reduced to a memory adjacent overwriting attack but usually it is obtained exploiting the last null byte of a buffer, hence we are going to show that the same result is still possible writing behind a buffer, under certain conditions. To fully understand the subject of this article it's necessary to describe the memory organization1 of running processes, then the memory adjacent overwrite attack, concluding with our analysis.
This is classic buffer overflow. I think the title of the article perhaps was mistranslated. It would be better like "Writing Beyond a Buffer" or "Writing Outside a Buffer". It is obvious to me that English is not the author's first language.
While it is probably still the case that many programmers do need to be better educated about this kind of problem, this article isn't really providing anything new, and it certainly doesn't get into any details that could help programmers. The one thing programmers should always do is be certain that any code which stores bytes into their buffers is carefully restricted so it is never possible under any conditions to write to the buffer with indexes less than zero or greater that one less than the size of the buffer. Obviously, avoiding the few standard C functions that offer no such protection, is the first step. Then, making sure the code that is written does the right things, is next.
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:
|||||
10
Markdown: **bold**, *italic*, [text](https://link), - lists, > quotes, $x^2$ for math. Formatting help
While it is probably still the case that many programmers do need to be better educated about this kind of problem, this article isn't really providing anything new, and it certainly doesn't get into any details that could help programmers. The one thing programmers should always do is be certain that any code which stores bytes into their buffers is carefully restricted so it is never possible under any conditions to write to the buffer with indexes less than zero or greater that one less than the size of the buffer. Obviously, avoiding the few standard C functions that offer no such protection, is the first step. Then, making sure the code that is written does the right things, is next.