Knowing that there are some good compiler guys in here: does anybody remember a paper and set of patches for GCC that randomises register allocation and makes random choices for the code generator (e.g. zero a register either by xor a,a or sub a,a etc.) in order to give buffer overflows less to bite on? Any URLs etc. would be much appreciated.

Could such a thing be done for FPC? :-)

For FPC I think it's better for security critical code to use only the managed datastructures (strings, dynarrays) and compile it with range checking on (and perhaps even overflow checking).

Nikolay

I suspect I was thinking of CASPER
www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a446095.pdf although my recollection of its mode of operation was wrong.

Apologies for not having been aware of certain directly-relevant European papers before asking.