Memory corruption

Memory corruption occurs in a computer program when the contents of a memory location are unintentionally modified; this is termed violating memory safety. The most likely cause of memory corruption is programming error. When the corrupted memory contents are used later in that program, it leads either to program crash or to strange and bizarre program behavior. Nearly 10% of application crashes on Windows systems are due to heap corruption.

Modern programming languages like C and C++ have powerful features of explicit memory management and pointer arithmetic. These features are designed for developing efficient applications and system software. However, using these features incorrectly may lead to memory corruption errors.

Memory corruption is one of the most intractable class of programming errors, for two reasons:

Memory corruption errors can be broadly classified into four categories:

Many memory debuggers such as Purify, Valgrind, Insure++, Parasoft C/C++test, AddressSanitizer are available to detect memory corruption errors.

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