

On the bright side, while security was not a driving factor in early computer and software design, engineers realized that changing running instructions in memory was a bad idea, so even as long ago as the ‘90s, standard hardware and operating systems were doing a good job of preventing changes to instructional memory. It’s still in use in most computers to this day, though as you will see, it is not without complications. Such an approach where data and instructions are stored together is known as a Von Neumann architecture. Both are stored in the same memory because memory was prohibitively expensive in the early days of computing, and reserving it for one type of storage or another was wasteful. Memory in a computer is simply a storage place for data and instructions-data for storing numbers, letters, images, and anything else, and instructions that tell the computer what to do with the data. Understanding stack-based overflow attacks involves at least a basic understanding of computer memory. Deep dive on stack-based buffer overflow attacks

Below, we will explore how stack-based overflows work and detail the mitigation strategies that are put in place to try to prevent them. These exploits were extremely common 20 years ago, but since then, a huge amount of effort has gone into mitigating stack-based overflow attacks by operating system developers, application developers, and hardware manufacturers, with changes even being made to the standard libraries developers use. Stack-based buffer overflow exploits are likely the shiniest and most common form of exploit for remotely taking over the code execution of a process. Last updated at Thu, 21:22:24 GMT What are buffer overflow attacks?
