DeveloperWorks piece on Buffer Overflows

Contributed by jose on 2004-02-08 from the education dept.

IBM DeveloperWorks has an article discussing the origins of buffer overflows in C and C++ development along with various mechanisms which prevent their successful exploitation. Among the remedies mentioned are ProPolice (originally developed by IBM, incorporated into the base system by OpenBSD in May, 2003) and safer APIs like strlcpy().

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-sp4.html?ca=dgr-lnxw06SecOverflow

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Comments

By some anonymous smartazz () on 2004-02-08 11:43

*comments on the lack of comments
By clvrmnky () on 2004-02-08 17:13 http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/

Nice resource. The same author has written a HOWTO on safer C coding for UNIX. It looks pretty comprehensive, and is written in a very understandable manner.
As luck would have it, I'm in the middle of doing some post-release maintenance on some legacy C code, and am probably going to audit the use of strcat() and strcpy() in this code for safety. The last few days have been a really and eye-opener for me. I've reviewed several references on safer C coding, and had some of my assumptions about the standard string library and pointers challenged.
Of course, if I'd actually paid attention to the man pages, I'd have figured this out for myself. It's nice to have experts share their experience and show you how things can go pear-shaped.
My C kung-fu is definitely stronger as a result.

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