Stack growth direction to thwart buffer overflow attacks

From: Earl Chew (earl.chew_at_cheerful.com)
Date: 08/13/03

  • Next message: Phil Fites: "Re: Stack growth direction to thwart buffer overflow attacks" 
    Date: 12 Aug 2003 16:54:34 -0700

    The other day I mused that using an upward growing stack would be
    immune to buffer overflow attacks. Searching comp.arch I found
    this old posting:

    http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=4495o9%24e8n%40server05.icaen.uiowa.edu

    I would think that this simple strategy is worthy of wider
    discussion and implementation.

    In the past, these kinds of attacks were not as important, and the
    choice of direction for stack growth was probably driven by other
    criteria.

    It seems to me that the tactic of growing the stack upwards would
    remove most of the risk of buffer overflow attack. Such an
    attack would most likely crash the executing process, and there
    is a possibility that the attacker could carefully overwrite
    local variables to breach local security checks.

    Most importantly, such an attack would not be able to hijack
    return addresses since they would be stored at smaller addresses,
    and buffer overflow works towards higher addresses.

    Earl

  • Next message: Phil Fites: "Re: Stack growth direction to thwart buffer overflow attacks"

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