Preparation for Recitation 21

For today, read the paper by Jonathan Pincus and Brandon Baker, Beyond stack smashing: recent advances in exploiting buffer overruns.

Stack smashing is one of the most frequent attacks used on computer systems that run software written in the C programming language (see sidebar 11-4 on page 11-751 of the class notes). Most simple attacks won't work anymore, but attackers have come up with more sophisticated versions. This paper describes some of those versions.

Please answer the following question:

The authors describe a variety of attacks. What is the root cause that allows these attacks to occur?

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