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"Book of unreleased exploits" Clarification
From: "Jack Koziol" <jack.koziol () infosecinstitute com>
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 14:45:53 -0600
Over the weekend there were a bunch of posts to FD talking about a "Book of unreleased exploits". As the lead author for the book in question, The Shellcoder's Handbook, I want to get a post out to FD to clarify what Shellcoder's is all about, and dispel some of the misinformation floating around about it. Essentially, yes, there are some 0day or unreleased exploits contained in the book, but it is by no means a "compendium" of them, and there is nowhere near 150 of them. The goal of the book is to teach vulnerability development/discovery and software exploitation for programs written in C family of languages. In the book, the 0day is somewhat of an afterthought, it was included primarily to prove that the techniques and examples in the book can be used to find security bugs for software actually used in the real world. It makes the content of the book more interesting, rather than exploiting simple 5 line programs for 700 pages, we slowly graduate the reader to vuln dev on a variety of real world applications and on many different platforms (Linux/Win32 on IA32, solaris on sparc, Tru64, etc.). Like Dave said when we were roughing out the table of contents over a year ago, "lots of people have read Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit, but very few can actually do something with it". The book has four parts, first showing the reader how to write exploits for simple contrived programs, then graduating to real software exploitation, flowing to how to discover these bugs via binary/source auditing, instrumented investigation, and fuzzing. Finally we cover some advanced content, such as finding and exploiting bugs in the Solaris and OpenBSD kernels, and exploit development for database software packages. Jack Koziol PS: A group of incredibly brilliant people worked very hard on making this book possible, and to call it "lame" without ever having read it, is well, to use your own language, really lame. If you read/skim it at Borders and think it sucks, that's cool, but at least take the time to read something before your criticize it in public. _______________________________________________ Full-Disclosure - We believe in it. Charter: http://lists.netsys.com/full-disclosure-charter.html
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- "Book of unreleased exploits" Clarification Jack Koziol (Mar 15)