A systems administrator wants to enable a setting to make it difficult for buffer overflow attacks to locate the area of memory needed to successfully perform an exploit. What is this called?

The term that describes the technique used to make it difficult for buffer overflow attacks to pinpoint the necessary area of memory for a successful exploit is Address Space Layout Randomization, commonly abbreviated as ASLR. This security feature randomizes the memory addresses used by a program each time it is executed, which means that the location of key areas, such as the stack, heap, and libraries, is not predictable.

By randomizing address spaces, ASLR effectively complicates the attacker's ability to craft effective payloads for buffer overflow exploits. Since the address of the buffer and the location of the executed code change each time the application starts, the attacker cannot reliably leverage a fixed address to execute their malicious code. This increases the difficulty of successful alignment in their attack strategies.

Other concepts, such as race conditions, depend on timing and synchronization issues in a system, which is separate from memory address exploitation. The Time of Check, Time of Use (TOC/TOU) attacks pertain to the exploitation of the time gap between checking permissions and using a resource, not specifically to memory layout. Data Execution Protection (DEP) is another security measure that marks certain areas of memory as non-executable, which prevents code from executing in those locations but does not randomize