Summary
Software vulnerabilities in native code represent a relatively niche area in relation to attacks on web applications. Most applications run in a managed execution environment in which the classic software flaws described in this chapter do not arise. However, occasionally these kinds of vulnerabilities are highly relevant and have been found to affect many web applications running on hardware devices and other unmanaged environments. A large proportion of such vulnerabilities can be detected by submitting a specific set of test cases to the server and monitoring its behavior.
Some vulnerabilities in native applications are relatively easy to exploit, such as the off-by-one vulnerability described in this chapter. However, in most cases, they are difficult to exploit given only remote access to the vulnerable application.
In contrast to most other types of web application vulnerabilities, even the act of probing for classic software flaws is quite likely to cause a denial-of-service...