Control-flow hijacking is an exploitation outcome where an attacker redirects a program’s execution away from its intended path. Instead of reaching the next legitimate instruction, the code may jump to attacker-influenced data, a corrupted return address, a fake function pointer, or another unsafe target. This can happen after memory corruption bugs such as use-after-free, buffer overflows, or out-of-bounds writes.
It matters because modern defenses are designed to protect control data: stack canaries, non-executable memory, control-flow integrity, and kernel hardening all try to stop or limit this kind of takeover. In real attacks, control-flow hijacking is often the step that turns a crash into code execution or privilege escalation. In kernel bugs, the stakes are even higher, because successful hijacking can affect trusted system code and potentially bypass user-space security boundaries.