Buffer Overflow and Format String Overflow Vulnerabilities

This article surveys representative techniques of exploiting bu#er overflow and format string overflow vulnerabilities and their currently available defensive measures. We also describe our bu#er overflow detection technique that range checks the referenced bu#ers at run time. We augment executable files with type information of automatic bu#ers (local variables and parameters of functions) and static bu#ers (global variables in the data/bss section), and maintain the sizes of allocated heap bu#ers in order to detect an actual occurrence of bu#er overflow. We describe a simple implementation with which we currently protect vulnerable copy functions in the C librar