Re: How to develop a random number generation device

On Fri, 14 Sep 2007 17:33:28 +0000, Rich Grise wrote:

That doesn't address the issue, which was whether the OS can
prevent buffer overruns.

With a hardware MMU, and software that can catch the exception, yes.

That still doesn't address the question of how you decide that a write
operation has overrun its buffer; the details of where one buffer starts
and another ends are unknown to the OS.

You might be able to catch specific cases (e.g. overwriting a return
address), if you're willing to take a massive performance hit (i.e. a
context switch on all writes to the stack). Even then, that isn't the only
type of buffer overrun which can be exploited.

.

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