buffer overflow
Sign in to saveAlso known as buffer overrun, Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer, BOF
anomaly in computer security and programming that could be exploited as a security vulnerability
~27 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Visualization of a software buffer overflow. Data is written into A, but is too large to fit within A, so it overflows into B.
In programming and information security, a buffer overflow or buffer overrun is an anomaly whereby a program writes data to a buffer beyond the buffer's allocated memory, overwriting adjacent memory locations.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “buffer overflow” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.