How do I terminate a .NET thread that has had its call stack corrupted?

Question

I have a thread in my application that is running code that can potentially cause call stack corruption ( my application is a testing tool for dlls ).

Assuming that I have a method of detecting if the child thread is misbehaving, how would I terminate it? From what I read, calling Thread.Abort() on the misbehaving thread would be equivalent to raising an exception inside it.I fear that that not be a good idea, provided the call stack of the thread might be corrupted.Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If code is misbehaving, it can do anything, and it can affect anything in the entire process, on any thread.

The most reliable solution is to run the untrusted code in a separate process, then terminate the process if it misbehaves.

Answer 2

If you are running untrusted code that could corrupt your process run that code in a separate process and communicate with it using interprocess communication. If you want to terminate the untrusted code early, you can just kill the process.

Answer 3

This article might interest you, it is from Eric Lippert himself: Careful with that axe, should I specify timeout?

Answer 4

Load the DLL into a new AppDomain and run the code in the DLL from there using the AppDomain.DoCallBack method.

Answer 5

In addition to the accept answer, I'd like to add that it is trivially easy to ignore Thread.Abort.

try
{
    ...
}
catch (ThreadAbortException)
{
   Thread.ResetAbort();
}