NULL-ifying Application Security
Exploiting buffer overflows is old news. Security researchers are now losing sleep over the NULL pointer...
NULL pointer exploit excites researchers - CIO
Quote:
In simple terms a NULL pointer dereference is when a software application tries to access a memory address that has been declared to have the value NULL (a special value that tells software that there is nothing there, as there is a real but critical difference between '', ' ', '0', NULL, or any other number of means of representing nothing). In most cases, the application should stop running and crash whenever a NULL value in memory is accessed by the program, but it has been found that it is possible to force some applications to access and execute arbitrary memory locations whenever a NULL pointer is accessed. The only problem has been that it was considered extremely difficult to achieve, and not so easy to develop a generic approach for. That has now changed, with Dowd effectively providing a framework that could be used to probe for exploitable NULL pointer dereferences across multiple platforms - essentially a generic attack / vulnerability finder for this class of vulnerability.
Fun, huh?
