Editing Buffer overflow protection (section)

===StackGhost (hardware-based)===
Invented by [[Mike Frantzen]], StackGhost is a simple tweak to the register window spill/fill routines which makes buffer overflows much more difficult to exploit. It uses a unique hardware feature of the [[Sun Microsystems]] [[SPARC]] architecture (that being: deferred on-stack in-frame register window spill/fill) to detect modifications of return [[Pointer (computer programming)|pointers]] (a common way for an [[exploit (computer security)|exploit]] to hijack execution paths) transparently, automatically protecting all applications without requiring binary or source modifications. The performance impact is negligible, less than one percent. The resulting [[gdb]] issues were resolved by [[Mark Kettenis]] two years later, allowing enabling of the feature. Following this event, the StackGhost code was integrated (and optimized) into [[OpenBSD]]/SPARC.