A security analyst, during a dynamic scan of an internally developed application, identifies a critical stack overflow vulnerability. The report indicates that the application does not properly validate the length of user-supplied input. What is the most effective control to remediate this vulnerability?
Configure enhanced logging and monitoring for the application.
Implement server-side input validation to enforce limits on input length.
Enable ASLR and DEP on the server's operating system.
Place the application server in an isolated network segment.
The most effective control to remediate a stack overflow vulnerability is to fix the underlying code flaw. Implementing server-side input validation directly addresses the root cause by ensuring that user-supplied data cannot exceed the buffer's allocated size, thus preventing the overflow. Placing the application in an isolated segment is a compensating control that contains potential damage but does not fix the vulnerability. Enabling Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) are exploit mitigation techniques that make it harder for an attacker to succeed, but they do not remediate the flaw itself. Enhanced logging and monitoring are detective controls used to spot attacks, not prevent the vulnerability from being exploited.
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