A stack buffer overflow occurs when a program writes to a memory address on it's call stack outside of the intended structure / space.
In this walk-through, I'm going to cover the ret2libc (return-to-libc) method. This method of exploitation is great because it doesn't require the use of your typical shellcode. It involves making sys calls to the functions provided to us by libc (standard c library). We're going to use the system and exit sys calls for demonstration.
To have a good understanding about how stack overflows work, it's extremely helpful to know how stack data structures work, and more importantly - how the call stack works. For the sake of time, I'm not going to type out how these two things work in great detail. If you want to know how these work, I would recommend watching stack and call stack.
