executable_stack parameter testing

[David Irish]

We are running HP-UX 11i 11.11. I have been playing around with the executable_stack parameter (currently set to "2", which is the trial or debug mode). In several months I have not had any errors messages produced from this feature (buffer overflow protection). I'm just curious if anyone has tried to test this feature - and what they did?

Thanks David

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi David:

If you have been running without incident (i.e no logged messages in the 'dmesg' buffer) then it is certainly safe to reset the parameter to zero (0) for full protection.

There are some sample programs in:

http://insecure.org/stf/smashstack.html

...if you are interested for academic curiosity.

Regards!

...JRF...