An Overview of Prevention/Mitigation against Memory Corruption Attack

One of the most prevalent, ancient and devastating vulnerabilities which is increasing rapidly is Memory corruption. It is a vulnerability where a memory location contents of a computer system are altered because of programming errors allowing execution of arbitrary codes. It particularly happens in low-level programming languages such as C, C++ because of their lack of memory safety. Many defense techniques against this kind of attacks have been presented and implemented to prevent it. However, an advanced version of the attack can bypass some of these techniques and harm the system. In this work, we present an overview of the Memory corruption attacks and the existing mitigation techniques for both compilers and operating systems. We hope that this survey will provide sufficient details that can be useful for researchers and system designer.