buffer overflow n.
What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer
(holding area) than it can handle. This problem is commonly
exploited by crackers to get
arbitrary commands executed by a program running with root
permissions. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing
rates of the producing and consuming processes (see overrun and firehose syndrome), or because the
buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must
accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For example, in
a text-processing tool that crunches
a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in lossage as input from a long line overflows
the buffer and trashes data beyond it. Good defensive programming
would check for overflow on each character and stop accepting
data when the buffer is full up. The term is used of and by
humans in a metaphorical sense. "What time did I agree to meet
you? My buffer must have overflowed." Or "If I answer that phone
my buffer is going to overflow." See also spam, overrun
screw.