Re: Is there any Buffer overflow attack mechanism that can break a vulnerable server without breaking the ongoing connection?

[Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>]

On Mon, 2005-12-26 at 15:47 -0500, Xin Zhao wrote:
> We are working on a mechanism that monitors the connections of a
> server and detects potential intrusions via broken connection
> (incoming request received, but no reply).  We want to thoroughly
> understand the possibility of mounting a buffer overflow attack
> against a server process without cutting off the connection.

buffer overflows do not break connections, and as such I think you are
out of luck.
Having said that.. on modern linux distros it's pretty hard to do a
buffer overflow exploit nowadays (NX[1] to make stacks non-executable,
randomisations, compiler based detection (via FORTIFY_SOURCE and/or
-fstackprotector)... add all those together and it's certainly not easy
to do this....



[1] or emulations of NX such as segment limits techniques