[ Thanks to Jamie
Adams for this link. ]
“An overflow is an anomaly where a program, while
writing data to a memory buffer, overruns the buffer’s boundary and
overwrites adjacent memory—which could be maliciously
exploited. While the onus is on software developers to perform
proper bounds checking there are some things you can do on an
operational system to help protect against code which has been
overlooked during development.“Most overflows are addressed during the development process
because testing will often uncover erratic program behavior, memory
access errors, incorrect results, and unexpected program
terminations (crashes). Those which aren’t identified and make it
into production are often abused by attackers who manage to inject
hostile code into this memory.“Program Memory Basics
“Kernels are complicated and as such can be difficult to
understand. For the purposes of this post, I will try to keep it
simple but if any of my facts are incorrect please, add a comment
so we all might learn. With that said, running programs establish
two key areas in random access memory (RAM): stack and data
segment.”