SIN 6FORMAT STRING PROBLEMS
OVERVIEW OF THE SIN
Format string problems are one of the few truly new attacks to surface in recent years. One of the first mentions of format string bugs was on June 23, 2000, in a post by Lamagra Argamal (www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/66842); Pascal Bouchareine more clearly explained them almost a month later (www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/70552). An earlier post by Mark Slemko (www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/10383) noted the basics of the problem but missed the ability of format string bugs to write memory.
As with many security problems, the root cause of format string bugs is trusting user-supplied input without validation. In C/C++, format string bugs can be used to write to arbitrary memory locations, ...
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