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

Part I. Introduction to Exploitation: Linux on x86

Welcome to the Part I of the Shellcoder's Handbook Second Edition: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes. This part is an introduction to vulnerability discovery and exploitation. It is organized in a manner that will allow you to learn exploitation on various fictitious sample code structures created specifically for this book to aid in the learning process, as well as real-life, in-the-wild, vulnerabilities.

You will learn the details of exploitation under Linux running on an Intel 32-bit (IA32 or x86) processor. The discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities on Linux/IA32 is the easiest and most straightforward to comprehend. This is why we have chosen to start with Linux/IA32. Linux is easiest to understand from a hacker's point of view because you have solid, reliable, internal operating system structures to work with when exploiting.

After you have a solid understanding of these concepts and have worked through the example code, you are graduated to increasingly difficult vulnerability discovery and exploitation scenarios in subsequent Parts. We work through stack buffer overflows in Chapter 2, introductory shellcoding in Chapter 3, format string overflows in Chapter 4, and finally finish up the part with heap-based buffer overflow hacking techniques for the Linux platform in Chapter 5. Upon completion of this part, you will be well on your way to understanding vulnerability development and exploitation.