Security in Computing 5th Edition by Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Charles P Pfleeger, Jonathan Margulies

Exercise 20

A flaw in the protection system of many operating systems is argument passing. Often a common shared stack is used by all nested routines for arguments as well as for the remainder of the context of each calling process.

(a) Explain what vulnerabilities this flaw presents.

(b) Explain how the flaw can be controlled. The shared stack is still to be used for passing arguments and storing context.

Step 1 of 2

Problems with shared stacks

a) A common stack is shared by processes to pass the argument. This implementation faces the following accountabilities:

• With the process sharing the stack, the processes may be misled by the stack.

• With the shared resource, conditions may arise when a process uses the resources or arguments meant for other process, with which it shares the stack. With this, the process may not work or may compute to an incorrect result.

• A process working on the stack may corrupt the data of other processes, which causes interruption in the execution of that process.