Understanding Buffer Overflow Attacks In Security
In my previous article, I have talked about some of the different types of Denial Of Service attacks that can happen in network security. In this article, I want to look at some of the facts that you need to know about buffer overflow attacks in network security. Follow me as we look at that in this article.
Another way of attacking a system is called a buffer overflow. It is sometimes referred to as buffer overrun. Some experts would argue that buffer overflow occurs as often as DoS attack but this is less true than it was a few years ago.
A buffer overflow attack is designed to put more data in a buffer than the buffer is designed to hold. This means that although this threat might be less than it was, it is still a real threat.
Any program that communicates with the internet or private network must receive some data. This data is stored at least temporarily, in a space in memory called the buffer. If the programmer who wrote the application was careful, the buffer will truncate or reject any information that exceeds the buffer limit.
Given the number of application that might be running on a target system and the number of buffers in each application, the chance of having at least one buffer that is not written properly is significant enough to cause any cautious system administrator some concern.
A person moderately skilled in programming can write a program that purposely writes more data into the buffer than it can hold. For example, the buffer can hold 1024 bytes of data and you try to fill it with 2048 bytes, the extra 1024 bytes is loaded into memory.
If the extra data is actually a malicious program than it has just been loaded into memory and is loaded into a target system. Or perhaps the perpetrator simply wants to flood the target machine memory, thus overwriting other items that are currently in memory and causing them to crash. Either way, the buffer overflow is a very serious attack.
Fortunately, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder to execute than a DoS or simple MS Outlook script virus. To create such an attack, a hacker must have a good working knowledge of some programming language ( C or C++) and understand the target operating system well enough to know whether it has a buffer overflow weakness and how it might exploit the weakness.
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