Vulnerability Guides
In-depth guides and analysis on vulnerability guides from the Safeguard engineering team.
20 articles
Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities: A Practical Guide
Buffer overflows write past the end of a memory buffer, corrupting adjacent data and often reaching code execution. Here is how they work and how to prevent them.
Open Redirect Vulnerabilities: Prevention Guide
An open redirect lets an attacker use your trusted domain to send victims anywhere — the ideal setup for phishing and OAuth token theft. Here's how to build redirects that can't be abused.
What is CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery)?
CSRF makes a logged-in user's browser perform actions they never intended — changing an email, moving money, granting access — using the victim's own session. Here's how it works and how to stop it.
What Is Privilege Escalation? A 2026 Explainer
Privilege escalation is how a limited foothold becomes full control. This explainer covers vertical vs. horizontal paths across Linux, containers, and cloud IAM.
Path Traversal Vulnerability Prevention, Explained
One unvalidated filename and `../../../etc/passwd` reads files you never meant to expose — or worse, executes them. Here's how path traversal works and how to build file access that can't be tricked.
Race Condition Vulnerabilities Explained
A race condition is a timing flaw where two operations that should happen in order overlap instead — enabling double-spends, TOCTOU bypasses, and kernel exploits.
Clickjacking: A Prevention Guide
Clickjacking tricks a user into clicking something different from what they see by layering an invisible frame over a decoy page. Here is how to block it.
What is ReDoS (Regular Expression Denial of Service)?
A single badly written regular expression can freeze an entire service under a short, crafted input. This is ReDoS — and it has taken down Cloudflare and Stack Overflow. Here's how to avoid it.
CORS Misconfiguration: How to Prevent It
A too-generous CORS policy can let a malicious site read authenticated responses from your API. Reflecting the Origin with credentials is the classic mistake.
Log Injection: How Attackers Poison Your Logs (and How to Stop Them)
Logs are supposed to be your source of truth during an incident. Log injection lets attackers forge entries, break parsers, and — in the worst cases — trigger code execution from a log line.
JWT Security Vulnerabilities and How to Avoid Them
JSON Web Tokens are only as safe as how you verify them. The alg:none trick, RS256-to-HS256 confusion, and weak secrets have all led to full auth bypass.
SMTP Injection (Email Header Injection): Prevention Guide
A contact form that builds emails from user input can be turned into a spam relay or a phishing generator through SMTP header injection. Here's how the attack works and how to neutralize it.