{"id":111602,"date":"2025-09-16T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=111602"},"modified":"2025-09-16T09:59:50","modified_gmt":"2025-09-16T16:59:50","slug":"20250916-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20250916-00\/?p=111602","title":{"rendered":"Translating the STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN<\/CODE> status code into customer-ready text"},"content":{"rendered":"

A customer had a major client that was encountering this error message:<\/p>\n

\n

INFOPATH.EXE<\/b><\/p>\n

The system detected an overrun of a stack-based buffer in this application. The overrun could potentially allow a malicious user to gain control of this application.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Note: Not actually InfoPath<\/a>. I just substituted them for the actual program because InfoPath is no longer supported, so I hope they won’t feel bad that they’re being used as the culprit here.)<\/p>\n

The customer’s client was extremely concerned by the admittedly alarmist text.<\/p>\n

The customer explained that this is an operating system level error that just happens to be showing up in this case with InfoPath, but in searching the device’s history, they found at least one instance of the error occurring with a different program. This message arises from any number of so-called “fast fail” conditions that an application reports to the operating system, such as an unhandled exception or an assertion failure. Even though many different failure conditions are being reported, the message to the user always describes it as a potential buffer overflow, even though that might not be the actual reason.<\/p>\n

The customer asked if there was any official Microsoft statement that they could point their client to.<\/p>\n

This is a common request to the engineering group. We call it “customer-ready” text: Text that can be shared directly with a customer.<\/p>\n

So here is some customer-ready text explaining the STATUS_STACK_BUFFER_OVERRUN<\/code> status code description.<\/p>\n

The message is used when the program self-detects that something has gone wrong. It was originally used for buffer overrun detection but is now used for general-purpose failure detection. The error message has not been updated to accommodate the expanded usage. A more accurate description would be “This program terminated itself after encountering an internal error.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reducing the level of alarm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-111602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-tipssupport"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Reducing the level of alarm.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111602\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}