Buffer Overflow Attacks and Their Countermeasures (Linux Journal)
Buffer Overflow Attacks and Their Countermeasures (Linux Journal)
Posted Mar 11, 2003 0:12 UTC (Tue) by cjcoats (guest, #9833)Parent article: Buffer Overflow Attacks and Their Countermeasures (Linux Journal)
As noted by another responder, the article misses a lot. On the low-tech front, the solution can be as simple as
Program it in Fortran!Not only is current-standard Fortran a nice and structured language to program in (with very mature compilers,
structs, dynamic memory allocation, argument checking), it also has a safe
implementation of character strings:
Think of a string as aIt's string-handling, made safe by design!structwith aq length-field and a pointer-to-contents field.String assignment has the following semantics:
- If the source is shorter than the target, pad the trailing end of the target with blanks; and
- If the target is shorter than the source, just copy the leftmost portion of the source that fits, and truncate the rest.
fwiw.
The LWN site is currently under high scraper load, so comment display has been suppressed for anonymous users. If you are a human, you may read the comments by clicking the button below:
Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.