Not the best solution

Not the best solution

Posted Jun 25, 2006 0:53 UTC (Sun) by bluefoxicy (guest, #25366)
In reply to: Not the best solution by Ross
Parent article: Address space randomization in 2.6

Dude, if you jump around bad in randomized code with addresses shifting about every time you start the program over again, you're going to have weird results-- mainly, the program hits bad instructions or unmapped areas and crashes. The more randomization, the more crashes you get.

When not randomizing, sometimes you'll run across something that screws with memory badly for a while; turns your window orange; halts it; produces strange noises; and crashes in some other object file entirely. For example a heap buffer overflow, that can get the heap manager (C library, libc) to try to alter "allocator information" in random memory addresses (hence, double-frees, heap overflows, etc as security attacks). This might not crash the program in certain cases; but if you randomize the address space, then those certain cases will certainly crash the program in one run or another.

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