Buffer Overflow I

Prerequisites & Requirements

• C Programming: Basic understanding of character arrays (buffers) and the string.h library.
• Linux CLI: Familiarity with basic terminal navigation and text editing ( e.g ., vim or nano).
• Security Fundamentals: Conceptual knowledge of how stack-based buffer overflows occur through unbounded string copies.

What will you learn?

• Vulnerability Identification: Recognizing unsafe standard library functions ( e.g ., strcpy) that lack internal bounds checking.
• Secure API Adoption: Migrating to safer alternatives like strncpy to enforce destination buffer limits.
• Defensive String Management: Implementing manual null-termination to prevent "off-by-one" vulnerabilities and memory leaks.
• Remediation Verification: Using automated test suites to validate security patches.

Tools

• Editor: Vim (for source code modification).
• Compiler: GCC-based environment (provided via web terminal).