Oracle^® SuperCluster M8 and SuperCluster M7 Security Guide

Enforce Nonexecutable Stacks

Enabling nonexecutable stacks is a very useful technique for thwarting certain kinds of buffer overflow attacks. When Oracle Solaris nxstack is enabled, the process stack memory segment is marked nonexecutable. This extension defends against attacks that rely on injecting malicious code and executing it on the stack.

1. Log in to one of the compute servers and access the host console as superuser.

   See Log into a Compute Server.

2. Enable nxstack.

   # sxadm set model=all nxstack
   

3. Verify the configuration.

   # sxadm get all nxstack
   EXTENSION     PROPERTY     VALUE
   nxstack         model        all