Penetration Testing

Chapter 16. A Stack-Based Buffer Overflow in Linux

So far we’ve used tools such as Metasploit and public exploit code on the Internet to exploit our target systems. But you may find a vulnerability in your pentesting career that has no such exploit code, or you may discover a new security issue and want to write your own exploit code for it. In this chapter and the next three, we will look at the basics of writing our own exploits. We won’t cover everything through the latest and greatest iPhone jailbreak, but we will look at some real-world examples of vulnerable programs and learn how to write working exploits for them by hand.

We’ll begin with a simple vulnerable program on our Linux target and make the program do something its developer never ...