The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes

The black hats have kept up with security enhancements. Have you?

In the technological arena, three years is a lifetime. Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, built-in security measures on compilers and operating systems have become commonplace, but are still far from perfect. Arbitrary-code execution vulnerabilities still allow attackers to run code of their choice on your system-with disastrous results.

In a nutshell, this book is about code and data and what happens when the two become confused. You'll work with the basic building blocks of security bugs-assembler, source code, the stack, the heap, and so on. You'll experiment, explore, and understand the systems you're running-and how to better protect them.

• Become familiar with security holes in Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Cisco's IOS

• Learn how to write customized tools to protect your systems, not just how to use ready-made ones

• Use a working exploit to verify your assessment when auditing a network

• Use proof-of-concept exploits to rate the significance of bugs in software you're developing

• Assess the quality of purchased security products by performing penetration tests based on the information in this book

• Understand how bugs are found and how exploits work at the lowest level