FormatGuard: Automatic Protection From printf Format String Vulnerabilities
Crispin Cowan, Matt Barringer, Steve Beattie, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Mike Frantzen, J. Lokier · 2001
format bugs" was discovered when an vulnerability in WU-FTP appeared that acted almost like a buffer overflow, but wasn't. Since then, dozens of format string vulnerabilities have appeared. This paper describes the format bug problem, and presents FormatGuard: our proposed solution. FormatGuard is a small patch to glibc that provides general protection against format bugs. We show that FormatGuard is effective in protecting several real programs with format vulnerabilities against live exploits, and we show that FormatGuard imposes minimal compatibility and performance costs.