Buffer Overflow Attacks: Detect, Exploit, Prevent

by Jason Deckard

Overview

The SANS Institute maintains a list of the "Top 10 Software Vulnerabilities." At the current time, over half of these vulnerabilities are exploitable by Buffer Overflow attacks, making this class of attack one of the most common and most dangerous weapon used by malicious attackers. This is the first book specifically aimed at detecting, exploiting, and preventing the most common and dangerous attacks.

Buffer overflows make up one of the largest collections of vulnerabilities in existence; And a large percentage of possible remote exploits are of the overflow variety. Almost all of the most devastating computer attacks to hit the Internet in recent years including SQL Slammer, Blaster, and I Love You attacks. If executed properly, an overflow vulnerability will allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on the victim’s machine with the equivalent rights of whichever process was overflowed. This is often used to provide a remote shell onto the victim machine, which can be used for further exploitation.

A buffer overflow is an unexpected behavior that exists in certain programming languages. This book provides specific, real code examples on exploiting buffer overflow attacks from a hacker's perspective and defending against these attacks for the software developer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932266672
Publisher:	Elsevier Science
Publication date:	02/21/2005
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Buffers and overflows ; Stack segment ; Attacks on the stack ; Attacks on the heap ; Discovering vulnerabilities ; Crafting a payload ; Attack delivery ; Real world examples ; Trapping attacks ; Preventing attacks ; Defense in depth