In fact, in "Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation" by Paul Karger and Roger Schell, having a stack growing up is given a lot of cred

In fact, in "Thirty Years Later: Lessons from the Multics Security Evaluation" by Paul Karger and Roger Schell, having a stack growing up is given a lot of credit: "Third, stacks on the Multics processors grew in the positive direction, rather than the negative direction. This meant that if you actually accomplished a buffer overflow, you would be overwriting unused stack frames, rather than your own return pointer, making exploitation much more difficult." https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf https://www.acsac.org/2002/papers/classic-multics.pdf