How does Immunix prevent buffer overflow attacks?
Immunix detects and defeats stack smashing attacks by protecting the return address on the stack from being altered. Immunix places a “canary” word next to the return address when a function is called. If the canary word has been altered when the function returns, then a stack attack has been attempted. The program responds by emitting an intruder alert into syslog, then halts and restarts the process.
