Executable memory: further programs that fail
Gordon Messmer
yinyang at eburg.com
Tue Nov 25 02:30:43 UTC 2003
Tim Daly wrote:
>
> I react to the notion that shared libraries can be placed
> "at random" in free space. Lisp systems, database systems,
> numeric systems (e.g. large matrix computations), all rely on
> large, contiguous blocks of storage. In fact the size of the
> problem they can handle depends on the size of contiguous
> storage. I don't understand why fragmenting free storage
> helps security.
I'm not an assembly programmer, so someone may correct me:
buffer overflow exploits rely on the ability to call a library function
at a predictable address. If the libraries are loaded at random
addresses, then buffer overflow attacks have a much more difficult time
predicting the address of a block of code to jump to.
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