Re: Buffer Overflow in Windows Alpha systems

From: Bruce Ediger (eballen1_at_qwest.net)
Date: 08/29/03

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    Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 17:32:36 -0600 (MDT)
To: incidents@securityfocus.com

    On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:

    > On Thu, 28 Aug 2003 17:41:11 EDT, "Whiteside, Larry [contractor]" <BAE14@SSP.NAVY.MIL> said:
    >
    > > Does anyone know if the buffer overflows that affect normal win32 based
    > > systems would affect a Windows Alpha system? Are the memory stacks different
    > > enough to cause the code not to execute against the alpha?
    >
    > Well, first you'd have to recode from x86 assembler to the DEC Alpha chipset's
    > assembler - the architecture is TOTALLY different.
    >
    > Anybody who's got enough Alpha clue to do that will have little trouble getting
    > the memory stack issue resolved.

    After the memory stack differences (not as weird as HP-PA architecture,
    where the stack grows up and the heap down), you may need to deal with
    instruction cache issues.

    To reliably execute code that resides in the heap, you have to flush the
    instruction cache on some versions of the Alpha. I could never get my
    self-relocating C program (http://www.users.qwest.net/~eballen1/cpup4.c)
    to run successfully under Red Hat linux on a UDB.

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