Introduction

Buffer overflow vulnerabilities are one of the most common vulnerabilities. These kinds of vulnerabilities are perfect for remote access attacks because they give the attacker a great opportunity to launch and execute their attack code on the target computer. Broadly speaking, a buffer overflow attack occurs when the attacker intentionally enters more data than a program was written to handle. The data runs over and overflows the section of memory that was set aside to accept it. The extra data overwrites on top on another portion of memory that was meant to hold something else, like part of the program's instructions. This allows an attacker to overwrite data that controls the program and can takeover control of the program to execute the attacker's code instead of the program. Peikari and Chuvakin point out that, "buffer overflows result from an inherent weakness in the C++ programming language." (Peikari and Chuvakin, 2004) The problem is that C++ and other programming languages (those derived from C++), do not automatically perform bounds-checking when passing data. When variables are passed, extra characters could be written past the variable's end. The overflow consequence could result in the program crashing or allowing the attacker to execute their own code on the target system.

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