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)
- 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 present | smashes the stack |
|---|---|
| present participle | smashing the stack |
| past participle | smashed the stack |
| past | smashed 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
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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “smash the stack.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/smash_the_stack. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
