Buffer Overflow Attacks

JISR management and social sciences & economics, 2003

The focus of this Study is on providing an understanding of buffer overflows, the ways they are exploited, and ways to prevent attackers from abusing them. Although this problem has been around for decades, the devastating effects have been downplayed by the commercial organizations due to the fact that they require a lot of effort to trace and to fix. This has led to a flood of software on the market which claims to be secure, yet can be exploited by wily hackers. As our reliance on closed-source and proprietary systems increases, we have to face the facts that there could be a myriad of security vulnerabilities in the very tools we use to protect critical data. To be informed is to be better armed.

2005

The July 2005 announcement by computer security researcher Michael Lynn at the Black Hat security conference of a software flaw in Cisco Systems routers grabbed media attention worldwide. The flaw was an instance of a buffer overflow, a security vulnerability that has been discussed for 40 years yet remains one of the most frequently reported types of remote attack against computer systems.

2003

Buffer overflows have been the most common form of security vulnerability for the last ten years. More over, buffer overflow vulnerabilities dominate the area of remote network penetration vulnerabilities, where an anonymous Internet user seeks to gain partial or total control of a host. If buffer overflow vulnerabilities could be effectively eliminated, a very large portion of the most serious security threats would also be eliminated. In this paper, we survey the various types of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and attacks, and survey the various defensive measures that mitigate buffer overflow vulnerabilities, including our own StackGuard method. We then consider which combinations of techniques can eliminate the problem of buffer overflow vulnerabilities, while preserving the functionality and performance of existing systems.

2005

The recent announcement by Michael Lynn at Black Hat 2005 of a software flaw in Cisco routers has grabbed the attention of many technology news sources. The flaw is an instance of a buffer overflow, a type of security vulnerability that has been discussed since the 1960s, yet remains one of the most frequently reported type of remote attack against computer

Buffer Overflow attack has been considered as one of the important security breaches in modern software systems that has proven difficult to mitigate. This attack allows the attacker to get the administrative control of the root-privilege by using the buffer overflow techniques by overwriting on the address of a returned function, function pointer stored on the memory and overflow a buffer on the heap. In this paper, we present the different buffer overflow techniques used by the exploiters and the methodologies applied to mitigate the buffer overflow.

Software Engineering and …, 2011

Various software vulnerabilities classifications have been constructed since the early 70s for correct understanding of vulnerabilities, and thus acts as a strong foundation to protect and prevent software from exploitation. However, despite all research efforts, exploitable vulnerabilities still exist in most major software, the most common still being C overflows vulnerabilities. C overflow vulnerabilities are the most frequent vulnerabilities to appear in various advisories with high impact or critical severity. Partially but significantly, this is due to the absence of a source code perspective taxonomy to address all types of C overflow vulnerabilities. Therefore, we propose this taxonomy, which also classifies the latest C overflow vulnerabilities into four new categories. We also describe ways to detect and overcome these vulnerabilities, and hence, acts as a valuable reference for developers and security analysts to identify potential security C loopholes so as to reduce or prevent exploitations altogether.

IT professional

The C programming language was invented more than 40 years ago. It is infamous for buffer overflows. We have learned a lot about computer science, language design, and software engineering since then. Because it is unlikely that we will stop using C any time soon, we present some ways to deal with BOF. Many of these techniques are also useful for other programing languages and other classes of vulnerabilities.

2005

ATTACKS How to mitigate remote attacks that exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities on the stack and enable attackers to take control of the program. The July 2005 announcement by computer security researcher Michael Lynn at the Black Hat security conference of a software flaw in Cisco Systems routers grabbed media attention worldwide. The flaw was an instance of a buffer overflow , a security vulnerability that has been discussed for 40 years yet remains one of the most frequently reported types of remote attack against computer systems. In 2004, the national cyber-security vulnerability database (nvd.nist.gov) reported 323 buffer overflow vulnerabilities, an average of more than 27 new instances per month. For the first six months of 2005, it reported 331 buffer overflow vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, security researchers have sought to develop techniques to prevent or detect the exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Here, we discuss what buffer overflow attacks are and survey the v...

IRJET, 2020

Buffer overflows is one of the most common form of security vulnerability. It may lead to an anonymous Internet user to gain control (partial or total) of a server. Mitigating buffer overflow vulnerabilities we can reduce most of the serious security threats. In this paper, we survey the various types of buffer overflow vulnerabilities and attacks, and survey the various defensive measures that mitigate buffer overflow vulnerabilities.

For the past several years Buffer Overflow attacks have been the main method of compromising a computing system's security. Many of these attacks have been devastatingly effective, allowing the attacker to attain administrator privileges on the attacked system. We review the anatomy of these attacks and the reasons why conventional methods of defense have been ineffective, and likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. Recently, however, several promising methods of defense have been proposed. We compare the strengths and weaknesses of these defense methods.