Chapter 10 Building Shellcode in C
In the parlance of vulnerability research, an exploit is a sequence of bytes embedded in a stream of input that’s fed to an application. The exploit leverages a flaw in the application to intercept program control and execute a malicious payload that ships with the exploit proper. Think of it as the equivalent of software food poisoning. You feed the application a bad input, the application turns green and promptly becomes a zombie that, in its weakened state, does things at your command.
The exploit’s payload is typically a series of machine instructions. Payload machine instructions are often referred to as shellcode because traditionally they’re used during attacks to launch a remotely accessible command ...
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