Gray Hat Hacking, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Other Shellcode Considerations

Understanding the types of payloads that you might choose to use in any given exploit situation is an important first step in building reliable exploits. Given that we understand the network environment that our exploit will be operating in, there are a couple of other very important things to understand.

Shellcode Encoding

Whenever we attempt to exploit a vulnerable application, it is important that we understand any restrictions that we must adhere to when it comes to the structure of our input data. When a buffer overflow results from a strcpy operation, for example, we must be careful that our buffer does not inadvertently contain a null character that will prematurely terminate the strcpy operation before ...