Exploiting a stack overflow vulnerability with Metasploit

A stack is a memory region where all of the return addresses, function parameters, and local variables of the function are stored. It grows downward in memory (from a higher address space to a lower address space) as new function calls are made. A simple example of how the stack is utilized by a program is as follows:

void somefunction(int x, int y)
{
    int a;
    int b;
}
void main()
{
    somefunction(5, 10);
    printf("Program Ends");
}

In the preceding code, we can see that the very first line of the program makes a function call to somefunction with two integer parameters, which are 5 and 10. Internally, this means that before making a jump to somefunction, our EIP register points to the address of somefunction in the memory. What happens next is that control is passed onto somefunction and after its execution completes, the...