Well, you have the window from 12/95 to 11/96 to work with. Before that, and you're predating splitvt, which was the work that mostly set us up to write the 1990s-form stack overflow exploit.
I distinctly remember him hacking on stack-smashing techniques while at Cyberworks, during our down-times... he crashed mine and his Indy a couple times, lol .. but maybe it was more of the exploratory work. I didn't pay as much attention as I should have, there were many other things going on at that company at the time, and I didn't really have patience for the people that were being brought in by the money-guy to shore things up, so I lost interest .. But for the brief period Aleph1 and I shared an office, it was definitely an interesting time watching him work. Probably I remember it more fondly than him, though. ;)
Part of the issue here is that we're running into a topic I am extremely, unreasonably nerdy about, since the first post-RTM working overflows are the K-T boundary of computer security. Having a working stack overflow on SGI MIPS, a delay-slot architecture with a split I&D cache, would have been a very big deal, and would force me to revise a mental history I've been grooming for a very long time. I believe Aleph One. :)
(We go back too, him and I; I met my wife at a party at his apartment).
Oh, his version of the history of his seminal paper is definitely canonical, no doubt about that - but I definitely remember seeing him hacking on stack exploits in the period leading up to when he released the paper, whether he had things working or was otherwise probing, and maybe there was a draft/discussion or two that we're both not remembering quite right. I remember him snarfing my DEC Alpha for a few quick checks, too .. Halcyon days indeed.
