Breaking the memory secrecy assumption

Many countermeasures exist that attempt to protect against buffer overflow attacks on applications written in C and C++. The most widely deployed countermeasures rely on artificially introducing randomness in the memory image of the application. StackGuard and similar systems, for instance, will insert a random value before the return address on the stack, and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) will make the location of stack and/or heap less predictable for an attacker.