The Shellcoder's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes (Paperback)

~ (Author), David Litchfield (Author), Dave Aitel (Author), (Author), Sinan "noir" Eren (Author), Neel Mehta (Author), Riley Hassell (Author) "In order to understand the content of this book, you need a well-developed understanding of computer languages, operating systems, and architectures..." (more)
Key Phrases: fake chunk, writing shellcode, auditing binaries, Unhandled Exception Filter, Oxff Oxff Oxff, Shellcoder's Handbook Web (more...)

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)

Product Description

• 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• Details how to deal with discovered vulnerabilities, sharing some previously unpublished advanced exploits and techniques

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Product Details

• Paperback: 644 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (April 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764544683
• ISBN-13: 978-0764544682
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.4 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 (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #559,392 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 82 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)

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.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, April 8, 2004

By	O. Durojaiye "dev1zero" (Bothell, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Deal..., April 9, 2004

By	Jeff Pike (Mechanicsville, VA United States) - See all my reviews

Here's how this ambitious learning resource is laid out:

PART 1 INTRO TO EXPLOITATION ON LINUX x86

1) Before You Begin
2) Stack Overflows
3) Shellcode
4) Introduction to Format String Bugs
5) Introduction to Heap Overflows

PART 2 EXPLOITING MORE PLATFORMS: Windows, Solaris, and Tru64

6) The Wild World of Windows
7) Windows Shellcode
8) Windows Overflows
9) Overcoming Filters
10) Introduction to Solaris Exploitation
11) Advanced Solaris Exploitation
12) HP Tru64 Unix Exploitation

PART 3 VULNERABILITY DISCOVERY

13) Establishing a Working Environment
14) Falut Injection
15) The Art of Fuzzing
16) Souce Code Auditing: Finding Vulnerabilities in C-based Languages
17) Instrumented Investigation: A manual approach
18) Tracing for Vulnerabilities
19) Binary Auditing: Hacking Closed Source Software

PART 4 ADVANCED MATERIALS

20) Alternative Payload Strategies
21) Writing Exploits that Work in the Wild
22) Attacking Database Software
23) Kernel Overflows
24) Exploiting Kernel Vulnerabilities

This is not just another security book! The wizards from bugtraq have shared a significant portion of their craft and tools with us in this book. For that, I am most grateful. Given the technical prowess of many of the authors, I was pleasantly supprised by their willingness and ability to explain concepts in very detailed, clear, and concise manner.

After spending some time with this book, I became somewhat disappointed by the number of errors it contains. A few solid technical reviewers could have easily caught these errors and made the end product much better. Another disappoint is that all of the stuff that the book promises at the website still hasn't appeared.

This book is not for beginners. This book assumes reasonable competence with C, Assemply, and computer architecture... all at an intermediate level.

This book stands out for the info it provides. Other books have tease and hint at some of these concepts for maybe a sentence or two, but they never truly explain any of them. It's rare to find explanations of this material. There is no fluff and no confusion (except for errors in the examples). This is well done, and a joy to read. It is the definitivie text book for students of vulnerability discovery.