The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes [Paperback]

Jack Koziol (Author), David Litchfield (Author), Dave Aitel (Author), Chris Anley (Author), Sinan "noir" Eren (Author), Neel Mehta (Author), Riley Hassell (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0764544683 | ISBN-13: 978-0764544682 | Publication Date: April 2, 2004 | Edition: 1

• Examines where security holes come from, how to discover them, how hackers exploit them and take control of systems on a daily basis, and most importantly, how to close these security holes so they never occur again
• A unique author team-a blend of industry and underground experts- explain the techniques that readers can use to uncover security holes in any software or operating system
• Shows how to pinpoint vulnerabilities in popular operating systems (including Windows, Linux, and Solaris) and applications (including MS SQL Server and Oracle databases)
• Details how to deal with discovered vulnerabilities, sharing some previously unpublished advanced exploits and techniques

Editorial Reviews

Review

essential for administrators who want to secure computer systems under their management& -- Computer Weekly, March 2004

“…80%…anyone developing their own software may be surprised by how easily flaws can be exploited and fixed…” (PC Utilities, July 2004)

“…essential for administrators who want to secure computer systems under their management…” (Computer Weekly, March 2004)

"...has caused some raised eyebrows in the technical community..." (www.infoworld.com, 17 March 2004)

From the Back Cover

Uncover, exploit, and close security holes in any software or operating system

Every day, patches are created to cover up security holes in software applications and operating systems. But by the time you download a patch, it could be too late. A hacker may have already taken advantage of the hole and wreaked havoc on your system. This innovative book will help you stay one step ahead. It gives you the tools to discover vulnerabilities in C-language-based software, exploit the vulnerabilities you find, and prevent new security holes from occurring.

The Shellcoder’s Handbook is written by a unique author team, consisting of "white hat" corporate security experts and underground hacker-cracker types, who are the most respected contributors to Bugtraq, a vulnerability tracking mailing list. They take you from introductory-level exploitation and exposing vulnerabilities in binaries to advanced content on kernel overflows. In addition, they provide you with advanced techniques to close new security holes that are not yet known to the public but could cause devastating consequences. With all this information, you'll be able to develop your own discovery process and quickly determine whether a security hole is truly exploitable. The methods discussed will also dramatically improve your penetration testing skills in order to achieve a "100% Penetration Rate Guaranteed."

The Shellcoder's Handbook shows you how to:

• Find out where security holes come from and how to close them so they never occur again
• Pinpoint vulnerabilities in popular operating systems (including Windows^®, Linux^®, and Solaris^TM) and applications (including MS SQL Server and Oracle^® databases)
• Write exploits for use with filters and hack closed source systems to understand what countermeasures need to be taken
• Deal with discovered vulnerabilities using previously unpublished advanced exploits and techniques

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 644 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764544683
• ISBN-13: 978-0764544682
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #861,991 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 93 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent material, but..., May 11, 2004

By 

Omar A. Herrera Reyna (Mexico City, DF MX) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes (Paperback)

Not for beginners as others have previously stated, you require deep knowledge of C, assembler and IA32 architecture as well as some knowledge of the Linux and Windows operating systems. If you have this then it will suffice (Even if you have not ever heard of a buffer overflow before).

What amazes me, and the reason of me not giving five stars to the book, is the enormous amount of errors in the book (no one else has talked about this on previous reviews). These go from forgetting to include memory allocation routines in some sample code and putting incorrect labels in some diagrams to talking about certain parts of code while actually showing completely different lines of code or talking about different addresses in the explanations from the ones on the sample code and program output that they talk about.

For example, on page 90 the authors wrote:

" Let's take a look at two assembly instructions that correspond to the free() routine finding the previous chunk

0x42073ff8 <_int_free+136>: mov 0xfffffff8 (%edx),%eax
0x42073ffb <_int_free+139>: sub %eax,%esi

In the first instruction (mov 0x8 (%esi), %edx), %edx is 0x80499b8, the address of..."

The instruction being referred to at the last sentence should be "mov 0xfffffff8 (%edx),%eax". "mov 0x8 (%esi), %edx" appears many lines below this paragraph, in another code sample, and it is completely unrelated to the explanation given there.

Of course, people familiar with these topics who also have a deep knowledge of the required programming languages and architectures will catch these flaws easily. The problem is that there are so many of them that it gets annoying at some point and you end asking yourself why do the editorial reviewers didn't do their job properly.

Also, I bought this book almost as soon as it went out for sale, yet as of this date (may 2004), the only material found in the web page of the book is the source code to most of the examples. Definitely much less compared to all the material that the authors promised in the book to be there (so don't expect to find more than this).

It is an excellent reference book though, and if you take the time to read the book thoroughly and make notes to fix the errors in the book you will find that even this activity is rewarding. Some might even argue that the authors put the errors there on purpose to keep script kiddies away from this knowledge, but I don't think that would be OK with a book like this which has created so much expectation. Hopefully the next edition will have all this fixed.

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, April 8, 2004

By 

Elijah D "dev1zero" (Bothell, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes (Paperback)

I've always been facinated by the amount of work security researchers put into finding vulnerabilities. This is a very good book on software vulnerabilities. It's also very current as it examines a number of the recently widely publicized vulnerabilities. It also rightly points out the fact that Linux/Unix are not as secure as a lot of people out there would like the public to believe.

The ways to get around stack protection outlined in this book was an eye opener for me.

I thought I had very good knowledge of the material the book covers until I actually read it. It is clear that as software shops continue to plug vulnerabilties, people will continue to find new ways to exploit software.

Clearly, this book is not for the casual reader. This is essentially a book for people who have above average assembly language and c/c++ skills.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent security book although misleading title, May 21, 2004

By 

AdV (N/A) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes (Paperback)

The title "Shellcoder's handbook" made me reluctant to even buy this book. I thought it would go about explaining exploiting stack, heap overruns, bypassing memory exploitation methods and so on in order to execute shell code: basically, a book for hacking and I didn't like that. Nonetheless, it took me a glance of the list of authors and the table of contents to realize that this book goes beyond exploitation and into core penetration testing and vulnerability discovery methods. Hopefully, like rational and ethical software security engineers will do, this book will be used more for vulnerability discovery and benign exploitation rather than malicious exploitation.

Parts 1 and 2 are a great introduction of OS internal, system calls, memory management, and in-depth analysis of security bug exploitation; thus making them relevant for part 3: "Vulnerability Discovery". Part 3 goes into great depth on how discover security bugs. No so often do we have the brightest minds in the art of software vulnerability discovery, penetration testing, or "ethical hacking" joining forces. The variety of ways to discover security bugs is what we need to learn in order to ship secure software or to successfully secure existing software applications. Great Job!