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In the previous post we looked at the underlying causes of memory unsafety which was using unsafe programming languages. In particular, C and C++ have been widely used for performance but at the same time carry risks of errors that cause unsafe memory accesses. Let’s now look at software approaches to mitigating memory unsafety.

Software mitigations

A variety of software mitigations have been proposed such as those listed by Saar Amar. The methods vary in granularity, determinism and implementation overhead.

Stack canaries

A well-known example of mitigating memory unsafety with software is the stack canary. If a program is executing and calls a subroutine, the address of the next instruction in the program is pushed onto the call stack and used as a return pointer (RP). When the subroutine has finished execution the return address is popped from the call stack.

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