Advanced Infrastructure Penetration Testing

Memory models and the address spaces 

Memory management is an important capability of every operating system. It is also integrated into Linux kernel. Linux manages memory in a virtual way. In other words, there is no correspondence between the physical memory addresses, and the addresses used and seen by the program. This technique gives the users and developers flexibility. Linux is dealing with the following five types of addresses:

• User virtual addresses
• Physical addresses
• Bus addresses
• Kernel logical addresses
• Kernel virtual addresses

The memory is divided into 4,096 byte memory chunks named pages, to facilitate internal handling. The 12 least significant bits are the offset; the rest is the page number. On the recent x86 architecture, ...