Writing Secure Code

Chapter 5. Public Enemy #1: The Buffer Overrun

Buffer overruns have been a known security problem for quite some time. One of the best-known examples was the Robert T. Morris finger worm in 1988. This exploit brought the Internet almost to a complete halt as administrators took their networks off line to try to contain the damage. Problems with buffer overruns have been identified as far back as the 1960s. In the summer of 2001, when the first edition of this book was written, searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://search.support.microsoft.com/kb for the words buffer, security, and bulletin yielded 20 hits. Several of these bulletins refer to issues that can lead to remote escalation of privilege. Anyone who reads the BugTraq mailing ...