topic executable stack in Operating System - HP-UX

executable stack

Greg Wooden — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:01:12 GMT

Does having executable stack disabled afford any protection against the various "buffer overflow" alerts that regularly come out of CERT? For example, the latest alert for CDE, HPSBUX0311-297 - SSRT3657 rev.3 CDE libDtHelp
.

Thanks.

Greg

Re: executable stack

Sundar_7 — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:14:43 GMT

Yes I believe so.

But it is available only in 11i v 1 and above.

Completely disabling it may render some of the applications unusable that require stack to be executable.

You can use +es option with chatr to selectively enable the stack execution capablity.

Re: executable stack

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 01 Sep 2004 12:40:12 GMT

I've had executable_stack set to zero for some time with no ill effects. Do a Google search on "stack smashing" to see why this is a good thing to set.