Maximum Wireless Security

Understanding Buffer Overflows

Exploiting a buffer overflow is an advanced hacking technique. However, it is a leading type of security vulnerability. To understand how a hacker can use a buffer overflow to infiltrate or crash a computer, you need to understand exactly what a buffer is.

A computer program consists of many different variables, or value holders. As a program is executed, these different variables are assigned a specific amount of memory as required by the type of information the variable is expected to hold. For example, a short integer only needs a little bit of memory, whereas a long integer needs more space in the computer’s memory (RAM). There are many different possible types of variables, each with its own predefined memory ...