Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit - Buffer Overruns

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Over the last few months there has been a large increase of buffer
overflow vulnerabilities being both discovered and exploited. Examples
of these are syslog, splitvt, sendmail 8.7.5, Linux/FreeBSD mount, Xt
library, at, etc. This paper attempts to explain what buffer overflows
are, and how their exploits work.

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Ive been reading alot of articles recently (well, all the time) and i found this one. Not sure the age (or the current relevance because of little knowledge on the programming side of the topic :() but it has shown me alot about buffer overruns and the concepts behind exploiting them.

Great for a bookmark in firefox :P

http://www.phrack.org/phrack/49/P49-14

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`smash the stack` [C programming] n. On many C implementations
it is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past
the end of an array declared auto in a routine. Code that does
this is said to smash the stack, and can cause return from the
routine to jump to a random address. This can produce some of
the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind.
Variants include trash the stack, scribble the stack, mangle
the stack; the term mung the stack is not used, as this is
never done intentionally. See spam; see also alias bug,
fandango on core, memory leak, precedence lossage, overrun screw.

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A bit too out dated i guess but certainly a nice place to get introdued to what buffer overflow is.
If you have read this article properly and tried to have fun practically by exploiting some local buffer overflow then the next step might be reverse shell exploit or bind to port exploit then rebind shell exploit personally i love rebind shell exploits.
Because they work in most of conditions unlike bind to port or reverse shell exploits which are just a POC(mainly for educational purpose so that we can understand what actually exploits do :P)
Try this http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=62&a=7

^ Why is it outdated exactly. Is smashing a stack today any different than smashing a stack was about 4/5yrs ago when that paper was written?

Aleph One's paper is probably THE most influential paper written concerning buffer overflows. It it quite well known and still an excellent read, as well as releveant. Aleph One (Elias Levy) has moderated BugTraq for years and incidentally is a total bad ass.


-Maestr0

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A bit too out dated i guess but certainly a nice place to get introdued to what buffer overflow is.

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Now your just starting to piss me off just a lil' bit, *******!

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Is smashing a stack today any different than smashing a stack was about 4/5yrs ago when that paper was written?

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Not really... you could make almost any program that accepts input from a user randomly seg-fault.

^ I knew the answer, it was a rhetorical question ;)

what i don't get is why are you making a post about "THE" MOST FAMOUS ARTICE on the subject!

i guess my reply would be....

YEAH WE DO KNOW!!!

lol i thought i had deja vu.
Myth1368 ;)

well, i found the articles priceless....

Im not a big programmer anymore, but im big in security and this article is by far the best ive read. I posted knowing that it could be an old article, but it was of such relevance today that for the people who didnt read it, should bloody have a look

I guess it's a good article, but there have been some recent texts which (IMO) are much simpler to understand. From "Smashing the Stack", I received understanding of what a buffer overflow was, but still found it very difficult to actually implement overflows. But I'd still argue that it was a great explanation of the exploit.

If you are interested in exploits in general, there is a book called "Hacking: The art of exploitation" that covers quite a few different types of exploits. And once you understand how they all work, it obviously makes it a hell of a lot easier to prevent the exploits from taking place in the first place.

ac

You want to learn about exploit get the book call shellcoder hand book.