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Question about buffer overflows in MS vs *nix	by romandas	2004-12-14 06:14:02
He's full of moderated	by TrogL	2004-12-14 07:28:39
You can do buffer overruns in any operating system. The main differences between coding for MS$ and unixen is that MS$ is written to look pretty on the screen and make people go "ooh" and unix is written to actually do meaningful work. Solaris may be slightly better than other unixen because Sun hired expensive smart people to write the OS. Linux is up there (there's a /. article about this) because a lot of smart people (some them the same people as above) have been bashing away (pun intended) at it for years. In contrast, Digital didn't hire smart people (geez, I had to tell THEM how to make the thing work) and their product suffered. Sun is now trying to get the best of both worlds by opening their source. AFAIK buffer overruns are caused by running past the end of an array. A typical example is an unterminated string. Start corrupting random bits of memory and a program quickly becomes unstable and perhaps exploitable if you can figure out how. If such program is running from root or suid, you can compromise the system. The main advantage to unixen (as pointed out by others) is that most programs are run by users with less than root privelege. On windows, for ease of use (eg. installing software) users tend to make themselves Administrators. So much for security.
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The whole point of	by Didactylos	2004-12-14 07:35:08

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