A buffer overflow: it's an easy enough mistake to make. And as the Jargon File puts it, buffer overflows are the source of "some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind"1 Yet buffer overflows are more than just a source of frustration for programmers. Indeed, they can create serious security holes, introducing vulnerabilities which can be exploited to achieve a denial of service or in some cases, to gain access and/or increased privileges on a system.
The standard Perl distribution comes with a debugger, although it's really just another Perl program, perl5db.pl. Since it is just a program, I can use it as the basis for writing my own debuggers to suit my needs, or I can use the interface perl5db.pl provides to configure its actions. That's just the beginning, though. read more...
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