From the course: CompTIA CySA+ (CS0-002) Cert Prep: 2 Vulnerability Management (2020)
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Dereferencing NULL pointers
From the course: CompTIA CySA+ (CS0-002) Cert Prep: 2 Vulnerability Management (2020)
Dereferencing NULL pointers
- [Instructor] Let's talk about another vulnerability that might exist in software applications, dereferencing NULL pointers. First, we need to talk a little bit about how operating systems manage memory. Computer systems have large amounts of memory available to them, and that memory is used for many different purposes. Some is used by the operating system. Other parts are used by different applications that run on the computer, and some is empty, awaiting use. The amount of memory used by any one of these components varies as activity on the system changes. To be efficient, the operating system allocates memory for different purposes when it receives a request from an application or another operating system component. It then assigns a portion of memory to that use, providing a specific address and memory as the location that may be used for that purpose. For example, if an application requests a chunk of memory to store a…
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