The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes

Chapter 13. Establishing a Working Environment

If you exploit overflows and format strings and other shellcode-level issues, you need a good working environment. By environment, I don't mean a darkened room with a lot of pizza and diet soda. I refer to a good set of coding tools, tracing tools, and reference materials that will help you accomplish your tasks with minimum fuss. This chapter will give you a starting point to establish that environment.

Generally speaking, if you want to exploit a bug, you need at least two items: a set of reference papers and manuals that give you the information you need about the system you're exploiting and a set of coding tools so that you can write the exploit. In addition, a set of tools you can use for tracing (closely observing the system under test) is very useful. We'll start by giving you a quick overview of the more popular items in each of these three categories. Since something new comes along in the shellcode world pretty much on a daily basis, don't take this as a cutting edge, state-of-the-art discussion of what's out there; rather, it's a quick compendium of the very best references, coding tools, and tracing tools available at time of writing.

Also, we do not favor a specific OS, so not all the items listed below will relate to the OS you're targeting. I list the relevant OS if it is important—if no OS is listed, then either the item is a tool that runs pretty much on everything, or it is a paper that applies to a general class of ...