A Bug Hunter's Diary: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Software Security [Paperback]

Tobias Klein (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 11, 2011

"This is one of the most interesting infosec books to come out in the last several years."
–Dino Dai Zovi, Information Security Professional

"Give a man an exploit and you make him a hacker for a day; teach a man to exploit bugs and you make him a hacker for a lifetime."
–Felix 'FX' Lindner

Seemingly simple bugs can have drastic consequences, allowing attackers to compromise systems, escalate local privileges, and otherwise wreak havoc on a system.

A Bug Hunter's Diary follows security expert Tobias Klein as he tracks down and exploits bugs in some of the world's most popular software, like Apple's iOS, the VLC media player, web browsers, and even the Mac OS X kernel. In this one-of-a-kind account, you'll see how the developers responsible for these flaws patched the bugs—or failed to respond at all. As you follow Klein on his journey, you'll gain deep technical knowledge and insight into how hackers approach difficult problems and experience the true joys (and frustrations) of bug hunting.

Along the way you'll learn how to:

• Use field-tested techniques to find bugs, like identifying and tracing user input data and reverse engineering
• Exploit vulnerabilities like NULL pointer dereferences, buffer overflows, and type conversion flaws
• Develop proof of concept code that verifies the security flaw
• Report bugs to vendors or third party brokers

A Bug Hunter's Diary is packed with real-world examples of vulnerable code and the custom programs used to find and test bugs. Whether you're hunting bugs for fun, for profit, or to make the world a safer place, you'll learn valuable new skills by looking over the shoulder of a professional bug hunter in action.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tobias Klein is a security researcher and founder of NESO Security Labs, an information security consulting and research company based in Heilbronn, Germany. As a vulnerability researcher, Tobias has identified and helped to fix numerous security vulnerabilities. He is the author of two other information security books published in German by dpunkt.verlag of Heidelberg, Germany.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: No Starch Press; 1 edition (November 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593273851
• ISBN-13: 978-1593273859
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #599,275 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Languages & Tools > Debugging

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars To the point November 8, 2011

By Happy Cat

Format:Paperback

This was a great read; short and focused. While it did not have as much variety as other books, such as The Art Of Software Security Assessment, Bug Hunter's Diary had little or no fluff and was filled with valuable content.

In each chapter, the author did a great job walking through identifying the vulnerability, and explaining the thought process in a digestible, straightforward manner. The brief enumeration of possible disclosure routes was also worded well to concisely explain why a bug hunter might pursue each avenue. Lastly, it was good to see the author track the remediating patch and identify the resulting vulnerabilities.

Tobias Klein is very thorough and detailed in his discovery of vulnerabilities, but in a concise manner. He sticks right to the point and keeps on track for honing in on vulnerable code and triggering said code with the proper conditions and data.

It was also amusing to compare differences in the disclosure timelines from chapter to chapter. Independent, open source targets were patched much more quickly than their counterparts that were fostered by larger organizations. It is uncertain as to whether this was an intentional observation, but interesting none-the-less.

This is a short, fun read for anyone who is interested in vulnerability analysis and exploit development.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ask Felgall - Book Review November 29, 2011

By Stephen Chapman

Format:Paperback

A read of this book may change your view of computer software forever. The real world security holes that it discusses were found in extremely popular software on a variety of different platforms and clearly represent only a few samples of such holes that are common across most software.

While a fairly advanced level of programming knowledge both with high level languages such as C++ and also with low level assembly language is required to be able to fully understand just exactly how everything described in the book works, it isn't necessary to have that in depth knowledge in order to gain some benefit. Since the purpose of each code change is described in detail in the book those without such an in depth programming knowledge can simply take the author's word for it that a given code change will have a particular result and will still be able to gain a greater understanding of just how vulnerable software can be. These are after all real vulnerabilities that the author found in common software that have since been patched. So as well as demonstrating some of the ways in which holes can be found and exploited the author also demonstrates how he has contributed to helping the owners of this software to patch some of the holes in their software and so make the software safer to use.

Perhaps the things that most stand out about software security from this book are first of all just how easily some security holes can be found by someone who has sufficient experience in "bug hunting" and second, just how small a code change is needed in many instances in order to fix these security holes.

In the front of the book the author describes the goals that he had in writing the book and the book definitely achieves those goals. One comment from the author particularly stood out as I read through the book "A brand-new MacBook: $1,149. An LED Cinema Display Monitor $899. Crashing a Mac OS X system with only 11 lines of code: priceless". As the actual code that he used had three blank lines in it and several of the other lines in his code would often be combined into one line by those using alternative formatting I'd have called that six lines of code or possibly even five lines of code rather than 11.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional November 17, 2011

By Gregory Zentkovich

Format:Paperback

There is a wealth of knowledge being passed in this easy to follow along book. Although some of the content (i.e. the source code), might seem cryptic at first, Tobias does an excellent job of going out of his way to making it understandable. In one instance, he was breaking down some assembly code and used pseudo c code to make it more understandable, and almost as if he could see my eyes still glazing over, he simplifies even further with pseudo code that was language-neutral (basically english), and then the light bulb went on. I was amazed at what I was learning. I also liked the fact that I did not have to concern myself or be distracted from the process because I did not understand some code, and that was huge. In addition, he has a lot of great visual diagrams, side notes, links to source code and the tools used, references for further study, basically the whole shebang. Simply put, Tobias made my first journey into the world of bug hunting an exciting one. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to better their programming skills, get into computer security research or just plain understand how software works this book will get you jump started and excited!