Stack Overflows

Introductions

• introductions of two students

Questions on the readings

The readings today are from Computer Security and the Internet, Chapter 6, sections 6.3

Stack-based buffer overflow attacks

• Stack overflow attacks are REALLY common — see CVE list

• Understand memory layout of a process: Figure 6.3, page 166

• Data = initialized global variables

• BSS = block starting symbol, where unitialized global memory is stored, eg. in C: static int bufferX[4];)

• Heap = dynamically allocated memory, e.g. in C using malloc()

• Stack = memory needed by the current function, e.g. parameters, local variables, return address

• Understand how a process uses the stack: Figure 6.4, page 167

• In a stack overflow, the attacker tries to write code to the stack and get the OS to execute it

• Understand the basics of a buffer overflow attack: Example, Buffer Overflow, page 167, Figure 6.5, page 168

• Note, this example assumes 4-byte memory words, but it works regardless of word size

void myfunction(char *src) { /* src is a ptr to a char string */
  int var1, var2; /* 1 stack word used per integer */
  char var3[4]; /* also 1 word for 4-byte buffer */
  strcpy(var3, src); /* template: strcpy(dst, src) */
}

Class exercises

See the software security repo for code we will use:

• In buffer-overflow we will run stack, which has an buffer overflow problem. We’ll use the exploit.py script to help create the overflow and direct the program to a return address of our choosing. This code implements the toy example from the book.

Time permitting, we will also try the first exploits from the homework.