Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a system-level memory protection feature that is built into the operating system starting with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. DEP enables the system to mark one or more pages of memory as non-executable.

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on memory to help protect against malicious code exploits. Hardware-enforced DEP marks all memory locations in a process as non-executable unless the location explicitly contains executable code.