In the technological arena, three years is a lifetime. Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, built-in security measures on compilers and operating systems have become commonplace, but are still far from perfect. Arbitrary-code execution vulnerabilities still allow attackers to run code of their choice on your system—with disastrous results.

In a nutshell, this book is about code and data and what happens when the two become confused. You'll work with the basic building blocks of security bugs—assembler, source code, the stack, the heap, and so on. You'll experiment, explore, and understand the systems you're running—and how to better protect them.

• Become familiar with security holes in Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Cisco's IOS

• Learn how to write customized tools to protect your systems, not just how to use ready-made ones

• Use a working exploit to verify your assessment when auditing a network

• Use proof-of-concept exploits to rate the significance of bugs in software you're developing

• Assess the quality of purchased security products by performing penetration tests based on the information in this book

• Understand how bugs are found and how exploits work at the lowest level

In the technological arena, three years is a lifetime. Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, built-in security measures on compilers and operating systems have become commonplace, but are still far from perfect. Arbitrary-code execution vulnerabilities still allow attackers to run code of their choice on your system―with disastrous results.

In a nutshell, this book is about code and data and what happens when the two become confused. You'll work with the basic building blocks of security bugs―assembler, source code, the stack, the heap, and so on. You'll experiment, explore, and understand the systems you're running―and how to better protect them.

• Become familiar with security holes in Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and Cisco's IOS

• Learn how to write customized tools to protect your systems, not just how to use ready-made ones

• Use a working exploit to verify your assessment when auditing a network

• Use proof-of-concept exploits to rate the significance of bugs in software you're developing

• Assess the quality of purchased security products by performing penetration tests based on the information in this book

• Understand how bugs are found and how exploits work at the lowest level