Smashing the Stack in the 21st Century

Aleph One’s excellent Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit article from 1996 has long been the go-to for anyone looking to learn how buffer overflow attacks work. But the world has changed a lot since then, and the original attacks will not generally work on modern 64-bit machines. Some of this is due to many new defense mechanisms that are now enabled by default (see Paul Makowski’s Smashing the Stack in 2011 for an overview), but those can be disabled if all you want to do is understand how these attacks work. What cannot easily be avoided any more though is 64-bit execution environments.