Kbase P120838: What is buffer overflow?
| Autor |
Progress Software Corporation - Progress |
| Acesso |
Público |
| Publicação |
29/11/2006 |
|
Status: Unverified
GOAL:
What is buffer overflow?
FIX:
A buffer overflow is an anomalous condition where a process attempts to store data beyond the boundaries of a fixed length buffer. The result is that the extra data overwrites adjacent memory locations. The overwritten data may include other buffers, variables and program flow data.
Buffer overflows may cause a process to crash or produce incorrect results.
A buffer overflow occurs when data written to a buffer, due to insufficient bounds checking, corrupts data values in memory addresses adjacent to the allocated buffer. Most commonly this occurs when copying strings of characters from one buffer to another.