Stackguard: Simple stack smash protection for GCC

Since 1998, StackGuard patches to GCC have been used to protect entire distributions from stack smashing buffer overflows. Performance overhead and software compatibility issues have been minimal. In its history, the parts of GCC that StackGuard has operated in have twice changed enough to require complete overhauls of the StackGuard patch. Since StackGuard is a mature technology, even see-ing re-implementations in other compilers, we propose that GCC adopt StackGuard as a stan-dard feature. This paper describes our recent work to bring StackGuard fully up to date with current GCC, introduce architecture indepen-dence, and extend the protection of stack data structures, while keeping the StackGuard patch as small, simple, and modular as possible.