The Continuing Arms Race: Code-Reuse Attacks and Defenses

As human activities moved to the digital domain, so did all the well-known malicious behaviors including fraud, theft, and other trickery. There is no silver bullet, and each security threat calls for a specific answer. One specific threat is that applications accept malformed inputs, and in many cases it is possible to craft inputs that let an intruder take full control over the target computer system.

The nature of systems programming languages lies at the heart of the problem. Rather than...