Memory corruption bugs mostly occur in low-level programming languages like C or C++. It is one of the problems that existed for more than 30 years when it comes to the subject of computer security. The lack of memory safety (or type safety) in such languages allows attackers to exploit memory bugs by altering the program’s behavior or by even taking full control.

Memory is used in blocks and malloc()/calloc() methods in C/C++ programming languages and are used for memory allocation and deallocation.

Sometimes, array elements accessed beyond the array limit can create many problems. For instance, it can set unpredictable values to the next memory elements or it can set invalid pointer values. It can even corrupt dynamic memory allocators which can cause the application process to crash.

Exploitation can be stopped by preventing stack, heap and integer overflows. Stack overflows are by far the most commonly exploited class of memory corruption flaws. The programming languages like Java, Ada, SML etc. are much safer than C/C++ and buffer overflow.

There are several ways to defeat security attacks. Type-safe programming languages, formal methods and compiler analyses have been adopted to stop programmers from writing insecure software. This doesn’t solve all security problems, but does help solve most of them.