The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes, Second Edition

Chapter 1. Before You Begin

This chapter goes over the concepts you need to understand in order to make sense of the rest of this book. Much like some of the reading required for a college course, the material covered here is introductory and hopefully already known to you. This chapter is by no means an attempt to cover everything you need to know; rather, it should serve as jumping off point to the other chapters.

You should read through this chapter as a refresher. If you find concepts that are foreign to you, we suggest that you mark these down as areas on which you need to do more research. Take the time to learn about these concepts before venturing to later chapters.

You will find many of the sample code and code fragments in this book on The Shellcoder's Handbook Web site (http://www.wiley.com/go/shellcodershandbook); you can copy and paste these samples into your favorite text editor to save time when working on examples.

Basic Concepts

To understand the content of this book, you need a well-developed understanding of computer languages, operating systems, and architectures. If you do not understand how something works, it is difficult to detect that it is malfunctioning. This holds true for computers as well as for discovering and exploiting security holes.

Before you begin to understand the concepts, you must be able to speak the language. You will need to know a few definitions, or terms, that are part of the vernacular of security researchers so that you can better apply ...