Goal of Today
- Understand the classic memory-safety bug so you can find it and prevent it.
- The buffer overflow has been known since the 1988 Morris Worm and Aleph One's 1996 "Smashing the Stack."
- It still appears today in C/C++ code that copies untrusted input without bounds.
Key Takeaway
We study how the attack works precisely because that knowledge is what lets a defender spot the vulnerable pattern in code review and pick the right mitigation.