CompTIA Exam Questions

Which of the following application attacks is used to gain access to SEH?

Which of the following application attacks is used to gain access to SEH?

A.
Cookie stealing

B.
Buffer overflow

C.
Directory traversal

D.
XML injection

Explanation:
Buffer overflow protection is used to detect the most common buffer overflows by checking that
the stack has not been altered when a function returns. If it has been altered, the program exits

with a segmentation fault. Microsoft’s implementation of Data Execution Prevention (DEP) mode
explicitly protects the pointer to the Structured Exception Handler (SEH) from being overwritten.
A buffer overflow occurs when a program or process tries to store more data in a buffer (temporary
data storage area) than it was intended to hold. Since buffers are created to contain a finite
amount of data, the extra information – which has to go somewhere – can overflow into adjacent
buffers, corrupting or overwriting the valid data held in them. Although it may occur accidentally
through programming error, buffer overflow is an increasingly common type of security attack on
data integrity. In buffer overflow attacks, the extra data may contain codes designed to trigger
specific actions, in effect sending new instructions to the attacked computer that could, for
example, damage the user’s files, change data, or disclose confidential information. Buffer
overflow attacks are said to have arisen because the C programming language supplied the
framework, and poor programming practices supplied the vulnerability.