Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hacker's Handbook, Fourth Edition, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 6

 

Shellcode Strategies

This chapter discusses various factors you may need to consider when designing or selecting a payload for your exploits.

            In this chapter, we cover the following topics:

            •  User space shellcode

            •  Shellcode encoding, corruption, and disassembly

            •  Kernel space shellcode

 

Reliable shellcode is at the heart of virtually every exploit that results in “arbitrary code execution,” a phrase used to indicate that a malicious user can cause a vulnerable program to execute instructions provided by the user rather than the program. In a nutshell, shellcode is the arbitrary code being referred to in such cases. The term shellcode (or shell code) derives from the fact that, ...