Vulnerability & Exploit Case Studies

Question

I understand the general idea of how vulnerabilities are exploited. Buffer overflows and stuff like that, but I guess I don't REALLY get it.

Are there useful sources of information that explain this area well? Maybe case studies about how particular vulnerabilities were exploited?

Even more interesting would be how projects you have worked on suffered from these kinds of issues.

I'm not trying to learn about currently existing vulnerabilities that I could exploit. I'm trying to get a feel for how this area could have an impact on any projects I may work on.

Answer 1

iss.net has articles on different examples of exploits, mainly explaining how to secure your system.

Answer 2

The corelancoder tutorial! A must read https://www.corelan.be/index.php/2009/07/19/exploit-writing-tutorial-part-1-stack-based-overflows/

Part 1 is a single BOF on windows, ... , Part 12 is ROP. It is hard, but the first one can be done in a day or two, and it should give you a real feeling on which difficulties one finds when writing an exploit, and on which countermeasures are useless/useful.

The problem with this area is that it is unclear until you try out something on your own, but that requires time. You could also check Metasploit to exploit problems directly (to have an idea of the impact) - you will find a list of exploit to fire to a target. If you need a target, use Metasploitable http://www.offensive-security.com/metasploit-unleashed/Requirements#Metasploitable

Answer 3

If you want practical examples of real life exploits, I totally recommend the book "A Bug Hunter's Diary: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Software Security"

It's exactly what you want. It's full of case studies and real life examples of almost every type of exploits and it explains it from the finding to fully writing a working exploit.

Also there are some examples in the book "The shellcoders handbook" but it's not as comprehensive as "The bug hunter's diary" Also "The shellcoders handbook" is pretty big and I only use it as a reference when needed.

Also sometimes I keep reading exploits from "http://www.exploit-db.com" and it helped me a lot but keep in mind not everything can be taught so sometimes you will need to improvise based on what you have and what you can control it's hard at first but it will make you feel great when the exploit runs and you see that calc.exe :)

Of course corlan tutorials and other tutorials are a must to know the essentials but they only teach you the basic concepts and you have to see some real life exploits in action to really understand the possibilities.