Fundamentals of InfoSecintermediate
Which of the following is an effective mitigation against buffer-overflow vulnerabilities?
Answer
Enabling stack canaries
Explanation
### Why this is right
- Size checks help prevent writes beyond a buffer's capacity.
- Memory-safe languages reduce opportunities for unsafe memory access.
- Stack canaries can reveal some overwrites before a return address is used.
### The concept
Mitigations can prevent the error, reduce its likelihood, or detect an overwrite. They do not make arbitrary input safe by default. Careful implementation remains necessary.
### The other options
- **Trust all user-supplied lengths**: unsafe because an attacker can provide oversized values.
- **Disable all auditing**: unrelated to memory bounds and removes useful records.
### Terms
- **Memory-safe language**: a language that limits or manages unsafe memory operations.
- **Stack canary**: a marker used to detect certain stack-memory overwrites.
### Remember
Check sizes, reduce unsafe memory access, and detect overwrites.
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