Heavy Wizardry 101

4SPELL OF THE OVERFLOWING FRAME: MASTERING STACK SECRETS

In this chapter, we’ll dive into one of the most important constructs in computer programming: functions. We’ll examine how functions work under the hood and see how the processor uses a memory region known as the stack to manage function calls and a function’s internal data. Then we’ll use that information to explore how buffer overflow exploitation techniques work by manipulating data in the stack. For a practical example, we’ll write a vulnerable program and walk through how to use a buffer overflow to exploit it.

In a sense, we’ll be doing a little bit of reverse engineering in ...