A company is developing requirements for a customized OS build that will be used in an embedded environment. The company procured hardware that is capable of reducing the likelihood of successful…

Question

Options

• AApplication whitelisting
• BNX/XN bit
• CASLR
• DTrustZone
• ESCP

• A
  17% (6)
• B
  72% (26)
• C
  3% (1)
• D
  6% (2)
• E
  3% (1)

Explanation

The hardware described - capable of reducing the likelihood of successful buffer overruns - refers to processors that implement the NX (No-Execute) or XN (Execute Never) bit. This hardware feature marks specific memory regions (such as the stack and heap) as non-executable, so that even if an attacker successfully writes shellcode into a buffer, the processor will refuse to execute it. For the OS to leverage this hardware capability, it must explicitly support and enable the NX/XN bit. Application whitelisting (A) is a software control that restricts which programs can run, unrelated to hardware buffer overflow protection. ASLR (C) randomizes memory addresses in software and is complementary but not the hardware mechanism described. TrustZone (D) is an ARM security extension for isolated execution environments. SCP (E) is a file transfer protocol and entirely unrelated.

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