Ive been reading alot of articles recently (well, all the time) and i found this one. Not sure the age (or the current relevance because of little knowledge on the programming side of the topic ) but it has shown me alot about buffer overruns and the concepts behind exploiting them.Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited. Examples
of these are syslog, splitvt, sendmail 8.7.5, Linux/FreeBSD mount, Xt
library, at, etc. This paper attempts to explain what buffer overflows
are, and how their exploits work.
Great for a bookmark in firefox :P
`smash the stack` [C programming] n. On many C implementations
it is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past
the end of an array declared auto in a routine. Code that does
this is said to smash the stack, and can cause return from the
routine to jump to a random address. This can produce some of
the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind.
Variants include trash the stack, scribble the stack, mangle
the stack; the term mung the stack is not used, as this is
never done intentionally. See spam; see also alias bug,
fandango on core, memory leak, precedence lossage, overrun screw.