By combining permission features of UNIX operating system and features of the C programming language, it is possible for an unprivileged user or process to gain unrestricted system privilege. Common to many high profile UNIX security incidents, this page contains links that analyze how these exploits are constructed, why they work and what can be done to prevent the problem.

Read more about "Stack Smashing Vulnerabilities in the UNIX Operating System" in PDF format. This paper begins by assuming the reader has little/no knowledge of security exploits in the UNIX world, and then moves into more detailed material.
Note that I originally wrote this paper back in 1997, and some things may or may not be outdated at this point. Aside from changing the contact information, all original contents have remained intact. -Nate 12/20/2007

Links

Aleph One's "Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit" from Phrack 49 Mudge's "Compromised - Buffer - Overflows, from Intel to SPARC Version 8" Mudge's "How to write Buffer Overflows" Lefty's "Buffer Overruns, whats the real story?" Prym's "finding and exploiting programs with buffer overflows" Richard Jones and Paul Kelly's bounds checking patches to GCC download Solar Designer's Non-executable user stack area -- Linux kernel patch Alexandre Snarskii's FreeBSD stack integrity patch Miller, Fredrickson and So's "An Empirical Study in the Reliability of UNIX utilities"

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Mon Aug 16 14:19:29 EDT 1999