A Bug Hunter's Diary

Appendix A. Hints for Hunting

This appendix describes, in more depth than in the text, some vulnerability classes, exploitation techniques, and common issues that can lead to bugs.

A.1 Stack Buffer Overflows

Buffer overflows are memory corruption vulnerabilities that can be categorized by type (also known as generation). Today the most relevant ones are stack buffer overflows and heap buffer overflows. A buffer overflow happens if more data is copied into a buffer or array than the buffer or array can handle. It’s that simple. As the name implies, stack buffer overflows are happening in the stack area of a process memory. The stack is a special memory area of a process that holds both data and metadata associated with procedure invocation. If more ...