Please click here for current information on StackGuard and Immunix. This page at OGI is being maintained for historical purposes only. Stack smashing attacks are the most common form of security vulnerability. Programs that have been compiled with StackGuard are largely immune to stack smashing attack.
Protection requires no source code changes at all.
When a vulnerability is exploited, StackGuard detects the attack in progress, raises an intrusion alert, and halts the victim program. StackGuard can now emit relocatable code, and thus can now produce ELF-compatible shared libraries. This has enabled us to completely protect an entire Linux Distribution of programs. If you use either the StackGuard Compiler or the Protected Linux Distribution and find them useful, please let us know . If you would like to be added to the StackGuard mailing list, you can subscribe here .