Summary

For a couple of years now, some security professionals have been sounding the death knell of ROP. It’s considered old and unreliable, and new technology promises to mitigate even a carefully constructed exploit with shadow registers that track returns during an execution flow. Then again, Windows XP has been dead for several years, but anyone spending time in large production environments today is bound to see it still clinging for life, running legacy applications.

Today, a significant effort in many organizations is not replacing XP but rather indirect mitigation via the network or third-party software controlling the execution of code. ROP is still relevant for the time being, even if just to verify that it doesn’t work in your client’s environment. The unique nature of this attack renders it particularly dangerous, despite its current signs of aging.

In this chapter, we reviewed DEP and ASLR as theoretical concepts and demonstrated these technologies...