smash the stack

English

Verb

smash the stack (third-person singular simple present smashes the stack, present participle smashing the stack, simple past and past participle smashed the stack)

1. (informal, programming) To corrupt the call stack, causing execution to jump to a random address, sometimes used as a malicious attack on a system.
   • 2003, Michael Howard, David LeBlanc, Writing Secure Code:

     There's something interesting about this approach — we haven't smashed the stack, so some mechanisms that might guard the stack won't notice...

   • 2004, Yves Deswarte, Frederic Cuppens, Sushil Jajodia, Lingyu Wang, Security and Protection in Information Processing Systems:

     We first wrote a vulnerable DLL and our own exploit code, and checked that the exploit smashes the stack.

   • 2005, Peter Szor, The art of computer virus research and defense:

     […] which in turn smashed the stack with a new return address that the author hoped would point into the buffer and eventually hit the shellcode within it.

Related terms

• stack smashing