I think you underestimate current C compilers. GCC with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 successfully detect a buffer overflow at runtime when doing: strcpy(((struct Data *

I think you underestimate current C compilers. GCC with -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2 successfully detect a buffer overflow at runtime when doing: strcpy(((struct Data *)data.next)->name, string_pointer) If the compiler knows the size of the input string at compile time then you will get also a warning during the compilation: /usr/include/bits/string3.h:110:10: warning: call to __builtin___memcpy_chk will always overflow destination buffer