P1L2 Software Security

Required Reading: The protection of information in computer systems 

Required Reading 2: A study on the Morris Worm 

Software vulnerabilities and how attackers exploit them

Buffer overflow

Stacks are used

• Function/procedure calls
• allocation of memory for
  • local variables
  • parameters
  • control information (return address)

Defenses against attacks that try to exploit buffer overflows

Security programming

• code “defensively”, expecting it to be exploited;
• do not trust the user “input”.