Word.ws English Dictionary

smash the stack

smash the stack verb: to corrupt the call stack, causing execution to jump to a random address, sometimes used as a malicious attack on a system.

Verb

smash the stack (third-person singular simple present smashes the stack, present participle smashing the stack, simple past and past participle smashed the stack)

  1. (informal) To corrupt the call stack, causing execution to jump to a random address, sometimes used as a malicious attack on a system.
    • There's something interesting about this approach — we haven't smashed the stack, so some mechanisms that might guard the stack won't notice...2003, Michael Howard, David LeBlanc, Writing Secure Code
    • We first wrote a vulnerable DLL and our own exploit code, and checked that the exploit smashes the stack.2004, Yves Deswarte, Frederic Cuppens, Sushil Jajodia, Lingyu Wang, Security and Protection in Information Processing Systems

Forms of smash the stack

third-person singular presentsmashes the stack
present participlesmashing the stack
past participlesmashed the stack
pastsmashed the stack

Questions about smash the stack

What does smash the stack mean?
Smash the stack means to corrupt the call stack, causing execution to jump to a random address, sometimes used as a malicious attack on a system.
What part of speech is smash the stack?
Smash the stack is a verb.
What is the past tense of smash the stack?
The past tense of smash the stack is smashed the stack.

Words near smash the stack in the dictionary

  1. smash products
  2. smash room
  3. smash rooms
  4. smash someone's face in
  5. smash someone's head
  6. smash the stack
  7. smash up
  8. smash-and-grab
  9. smash-and-grabs
  10. smash-mouth
  11. smashable

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: smash the stack (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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