Quote: "system with thousands of geeks watching like watch-dogs over the system"
I often wonder who these thousands of people are... surely people don't read the whole source code before they use it? Talking thousands of lines here, just for the KERNEL, let alone anything that sits on top. I doubt most Linux users compile the kernel themselves at all.
Quote: "When typing letters with the keyboard, the buttons are stored in a buffer until the processor has time to interpret them. This buffer has a limited size, and the most common hacking operation executed on a system is to overfill this buffer. When overfilled, the processor executes any machine code in the overflowing characters. This way, it is possible to inject code into the system and take control."
Buffer overflows and protection are nothing new, and have nothing to do with the keyboard buffer. I think you've misinterpreted. Generally, in a buffer overflow, the program overwrites code after the buffer, not that processors automatically execute code that falls out of a buffer. If the keyboard handler was the root cause of all security flaws, that single issue would have been fixed by now, eh?
Buffer overflows are generally the result of idiotic programming practice that is just asking for security breaches - stuff like this:
badfunction( char * cIn )
{
char cBuffer[ 80 ];
strcpy( cBuffer, cIn );
}
I seem to recall that some of the
Quake network code was full of stuff like this. In this example, if any text is passed to the function longer than 81 characters, the data - possibly the stack or function code, I don't know - after cBuffer would be overwritten with the content of the argument string. Good coding practice is either to get the strlen of the incoming string and malloc a new string instead of using arrays declared like this or to check if the string is longer than 80 chars (again using strlen) and reject if so.
Athlon64 2.7gHz->OC 3.9gHz, 31C, MSi 9500GT->OC 1gHz core/2gHz memory, 48C, 4Gb DDR2 667, 500Gb Seagate + 80Gb Maxtor + 40Gb Maxtor = 620Gb, XP Home
Air cooled, total cost £160
