I was recently reading about buffer overflows and dangling pointers. I read \"Sm

Question

I was recently reading about buffer overflows and dangling pointers. I read "Smashing the stack for fun and Profit " by Aleph1 and that paper was really clear and concise in explaination. On the contrary when I search for dangling pointers, I get some resources on what they are. I also found a BlackHat presentation about it and I understood it (not totally though). It gives a high level overview on how the exploit would work. Is there a "Smashing the stack" kind of explanation of dangling pointers using a C/C++ program? Or someone could please explain exploiting dangling pointers in a easy way which I test using some code of my own?

Explanation / Answer

In C or C++, a dangling pointer is what you (as a programmer) get when you have a pointer to dynamically allocated memory, delete/free that memory, but keep using the pointer.

The pointer now points to unallocated memory and trying to access it will likely crash the program. However, under certain circumstances it can happen that the memory gets reallocated to something entirely different. The pointer is now suddenly valid again, but points to data it isn't supposed to point to, like data the user isn't supposed to access.

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