The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes

Chapter 1. Before You Begin

In this chapter, we will go 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 suggested 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 can find many resources online at the Shellcoder's Handbook Web site, www.wiley.com/combooks/koziol. The site contains text files and tutorials that will help you in the learning process. You will also find many of the sample code and code fragments in this book on the Web site, which you can copy and paste into your favorite text editor to save time when working on examples.

Basic Concepts

In order 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. ...