Topic Introduction

This week we will be looking at Stack Smashing

Important

This is a pretty complex topic, and brings together a lot of computer-science concepts.

Its not in the coursework, so dont stress too much about it However, its good to know and do.

This week we will get comfortable with the causes of a stack overflow. How memory gets organised in a Linux (and windows) system, and how C makes function calls.

We will then take a look at manipulating the return addresses of functions to make a program behave in a different way.

Finally we will look at the "Classic" Aleph1 style overflow. Here we inject shellcode onto the stack then manipulate the return address to call our code.