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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

They can overflow the stack. They cannot smash the stack.

Fair enough; I had the mistaken idea that the two terms are interchangeable, but apparently stack smashing is only used for the attack involving the stack:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_buffer_overflow

so, pretend I said "overflow" instead of "smash" in my post.

Useless semantic pedantry at best, but arguable wrong as there isn't some sort of ISO standard on dumb hacking terms.

Overflowing the stack gives you a segfault. Smashing the stack lets hackers pop a shell on your computer. They are incredibly different. VLAs can crash your program, but they do not give attackers the ability to scribble all over the stack.

> Overflowing the stack gives you a segfault.

Maybe. If the architecture supports protected memory and the compiler has placed an appropriately sized guard page below the stack. If it doesn't then overflowing the stack via a VLA gives you easy read and write access to any byte in program memory.

If your architecture does not support this then you’re at risk whenever you make a function call.

Backpedal harder!

I’m not backpedaling. If your environment has guard pages and does probing then it protects equally well against VLAs and function calls overflowing the stack. If it has neither then both are liable to overwrite other memory. Obviously I would prefer that you have the protections, or some sort of equivalent, but they have nothing to do with VLAs.

Unless they happen to be enjoying kernel space.

There is no difference.

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