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buffer overflow: n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding
area) than it can handle. This problem is commonly exploited by
crackers to get arbitrary commands executed by a
program running with root permissions. This may be due to a mismatch in
the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see
overrun and
firehose syndrome), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold
all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed.
For example, in a text-processing tool that crunches
a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in
lossage as input from a long line overflows the
buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming would check
for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is
full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense.
“What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer must have
overflowed.” Or “If I answer that phone my buffer is going to
overflow.” See also spam,
overrun screw.
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