Study on Diffusion of Protection/Mitigation against Memory Corruption Attack in Linux Distributions

Memory corruption attacks that exploit software vulnerabilities have become a serious problem on the Internet. Effective protection and/or mitigation technologies aimed at countering these attacks are currently being provided with operating systems, compilers, and libraries. Unfortunately, the attacks continue. One of the reasons for this state of affairs can be attributed to the uneven diffusion of the latest (and thus most potent) protection and/or mitigation technologies. This results because attackers are likely to have found ways of circumventing most well-known older versions, thus causing them to lose effectiveness. Therefore, in this paper, we will explore diffusion of relatively new technologies, and analyze the results of a Linux distributions survey.