18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
18 lines
1.0 KiB
Plaintext
buffer overflow
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n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area)
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than it can handle. This problem is commonly exploited by cracker s to get
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arbitrary commands executed by a program running with root permissions. This
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may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and
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consuming processes (see overrun and firehose syndrome ), or because the
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buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before
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a piece of it can be processed. For example, in a text-processing tool that
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crunch es a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in lossage as
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input from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good
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defensive programming would check for overflow on each character and stop
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accepting data when the buffer is full up. The term is used of and by humans
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in a metaphorical sense. What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must
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have overflowed. Or If I answer that phone my buffer is going to overflow.
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See also spam , overrun screw.
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