Memory Corruption

Memory corruption groups together flaws such as buffer overflows, use-after-free, double frees, type confusions, integer overflows that produce bad sizes, and uninitialised memory reads. The common thread is that an attacker can force a program to read or write memory it should not, then leverage that primitive to leak data, corrupt critical state, or hijack execution. Memory-corruption vulnerabilities historically dominate browser, kernel, hypervisor, and document-parser exploitation. Mitigations span compile-time (CFI, stack canaries, FORTIFY_SOURCE), runtime (ASLR, DEP/NX, sandboxing, MTE), and language (Rust, Swift, managed runtimes) layers. Industry data shows that adopting memory-safe languages eliminates most new vulnerabilities of this class.