Smashing the Stack: An Introduction to Basic Binary Exploitation

Speaker: Alejandro Salinas, Associate Security Consultant at NCC Group

Abstract:
This presentation covers the fundamentals of 32bit binary exploits (focusing on the IA32 architecture) by means of logic abuse, overflows, and code injection. The goal is to arm you with basic knowledge of processor architectures and code review skills that will allow you to spot bugs and craft exploits for vulnerable executable.

Transcript

1. Smashing the Stack Alejandro Salinas
2. Buffers and Stacks and Heaps, oh my!  Buffer – A temporary storage location  Stack – Abstract structure that stores information about current routine  Heap – Freeform region in memory that used for dynamic alocation
3. Memory Segmentation
4. Stack & Heap  Stack is LIFO  Stack grows down (low addresses on top high addresses on bottom)  Stack and Heap grow towards each other (heap grows up)  Stack is static and fast  Heap is Dynamic and slower (memory allocated at runtime). Think maloc()
5. X86 Architecture crash course  Register-based architecture  General registers: EAX EBX ECX EDX  Index and pointers: ESI EDI EBP EIP ESP  Segment registers: CS DS ES FS GS SS  Indicator: EFLAGS
6. X86 vs x64 registers
7. Things to know  GDB or debugger/ disassembler (GEF, IDA, Binary Ninja, etc.)  Objdump  Scripting language (i.e.Perl/Python)  Basic native code programming (C/C++)  Basic assembly  Understanding of system architecture (e.g. know and understand how the Linux kernel works)  Other stuff, probably…
8. Intro to Exploits
9. F***k it, we’ll do it live.
10. Questions?