"There are documents from the US Airforce's computer security group in the mid 1970s talking about buffer overflows.": could you point me to this/provide more information?
It's sometimes said that they discovered or anticipated a lot of things that would preoccupy us over the next decades. I was personally familiar with them because David Wheeler mentioned that they anticipated the "trusting trust" issue with a compromised compiler.
Some of their terminology is different from current terminology, but there is, for example, a discussion of tampering with the stack in order to alter variables or control flow. I'm not sure whether the buffer overflow mechanism is discussed because the part that I think I understand is a different means of stack manipulation, specific to this environment.
https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics-orig.pdf
It's sometimes said that they discovered or anticipated a lot of things that would preoccupy us over the next decades. I was personally familiar with them because David Wheeler mentioned that they anticipated the "trusting trust" issue with a compromised compiler.
Some of their terminology is different from current terminology, but there is, for example, a discussion of tampering with the stack in order to alter variables or control flow. I'm not sure whether the buffer overflow mechanism is discussed because the part that I think I understand is a different means of stack manipulation, specific to this environment.
An obituary for Paul Karger:
https://www.ieee-security.org/Cipher/Newsbriefs/2010/karger....