sas 16(5): e5

Research Article

A Tool for Visualizing Buffer Overflow with Detecting Return Address Overwriting

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  • @ARTICLE{10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262495,
        author={Isao Sasano},
        title={A Tool for Visualizing Buffer Overflow with Detecting Return Address Overwriting},
        journal={EAI Endorsed Transactions on Self-Adaptive Systems},
        volume={2},
        number={5},
        publisher={ACM},
        journal_a={SAS},
        year={2016},
        month={5},
        keywords={integrated development environment, debuggers, buffer overflow, visualization, gui, c language},
        doi={10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262495}
    }
    
  • Isao Sasano
    Year: 2016
    A Tool for Visualizing Buffer Overflow with Detecting Return Address Overwriting
    SAS
    EAI
    DOI: 10.4108/eai.3-12-2015.2262495
Isao Sasano1,*
  • 1: Shibaura Institute of Technology
*Contact email: sasano@sic.shibaura-it.ac.jp

Abstract

Buffer overflow is a serious problem when the software is run as a server on the internet. Especially when the return addresses are overwritten intentionally, the control flow may be changed as the attacker intends. Although there have been proposed several ways to protect attacks that utilize the buffer overflow, the number of the errors owing to the buffer overflow have been increasing gradually. This paper presents a tool that visualizes the buffer overflow when executing programs in C language, especially when the return addresses are overwritten. The functionality is mainly targeted at beginners of C programming who do not recognize the attacks, which we expect makes the number of errors decrease in the future.