C Language – Understanding Buffer Overflow Attacks and Weaknesses
1. Buffer Overflow 1.1. Security Vulnerabilities 1.1.1. Causes Buffer Overflow is a security vulnerability where data is written beyond the size of a buffer, overwriting adjacent memory. When data is written past the buffer boundary, adjacent memory gets overwritten . 1.1.2. Impact and Risks The program may crash abnormally or produce errors. Critical data may be corrupted, causing unexpected behavior . An attacker may manipulate memory to execute arbitrary code or take control of the system . 1.2. Stack Buffer Overflow Stack Buffer Overflow is a vulnerability in which data is written beyond the size of a buffer allocated in the Stack area, overwriting adjacent memory regions. The main causes are insufficient input length validation and the use of unsafe functions that do not perform bounds checks. # include <stdio.h> # include <string.h> # include <stdlib.h> // Demonstrate stack buffer overflow: // Stac...