Many exploits, especially againsed network services are buffer overflows.

often, what buffer overflows are detected, a payload file containing the correct conditions to cause the overflow, and inject the correct machine code into memory are generated.

this payload has to be carefully crafted to cause the correct jump to the correct address.

the problem is, especially with closed source applications, is that every porgram is the same, (same exe for the same porgram version)

so why not run an application similar to pre-link to make each rpograms internal structure slightyl different?
a vunerable software version would still be vunerable, but no 2 computers could be hacked using the same payload, and an attempts o use an incorrectly crafted buffer overflow payload would hopefully crash the server (which is better than getting hacked, and forces the admins to apply the updates / patches)

i stared thinking about this after reading the man page of prelink.





this may be useless to manual hacks, but againsed automated virii, this could be a powerfull tool in slowing the damage, and lowering the body count.

Okay, you would first need to port it to win32, but the idea is there.

Okay, let's say it gets ported to win32.

Then should one prelink windows too? (i mean the services). If every single copy of the file is slightly different, would it still be possible to make patches that fix all of those copies?

nope, thats what the undo feature is there for

prelink --undo ; patch ; prelink

I will give you the point that it will be harder to implement some paloads but it will far from eliminate the problem as a whole. One common technique used is the NOP slides. Simply pad the payload with NOPs until the code gets to the correct memory address. Also does this adress using very common libaries, which many popular exploits use to break out of a certain memory space?