A developer is writing an application that accepts user input and stores it in a fixed-size memory buffer. To prevent a vulnerability where a malicious user could provide input larger than the buffer's capacity and overwrite adjacent memory, which of the following is the MOST direct mitigation technique?
Implementing boundary checking on the input data.
Enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) on the host system.
Using Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR).
Sanitizing the input to remove special characters.
Boundary checking is the most direct and fundamental mitigation for buffer overflow vulnerabilities. This practice involves programmatically verifying that the size of the input data does not exceed the allocated size of the memory buffer before the data is written. While input sanitization, Data Execution Prevention (DEP), and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) are all valuable security controls, they do not directly prevent the buffer from being overfilled. Input sanitization targets the content of the data (e.g., removing malicious scripts), while DEP and ASLR are system-level memory protections that mitigate the consequences of an overflow rather than preventing the overflow itself.
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