Summary

In this chapter, we learned the basics of low-level memory management during the execution of a program. We learned how to examine the finer points of what’s happening during execution, including how to temporarily pause execution so we can examine memory in detail. We covered some basic introductory knowledge on assembly language and debugging to not only complete the study in this chapter but to prepare for the work ahead in later chapters. We wrote up a quick and vulnerable C program to demonstrate stack overflow attacks. Once we understood the program at the stack level, we generated a payload in pure hexadecimal opcodes with msfvenom. To prepare this payload for the target, we learned how to manually search for and remove code-breaking shellcode.

Coming up in the next chapter, we’re going to look at how these principles have caused defenders to evolve, and the innovative solution of return-oriented programming.