Linux Exploits & Mitigation: Memory and Pointer Vulnerabilities

Skillsoft issued completion badges are earned based on viewing the percentage required or receiving a passing score when assessment is required. Memory and pointer vulnerabilities come from a number of common programmer mistakes. Being able to recognize, debug, and fix unsafe memory allocation and access errors is essential to avoiding vulnerabilities. In this course, you'll explore how memory and pointer vulnerabilities arise and how they lead to program errors and exploits. You'll look at how memory is allocated and accessed in a typical C program. You'll investigate what causes heap and stack overflows, use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities, and out-of-bounds access errors. In addition, you'll recognize dangling pointers, NULL dereferences, and off-by-one loops. Finally, you'll delve into how coding errors lead to corrupted memory and arbitrary code execution.