After my last post, I decided to go straight into the Advance Buffer Overflow (ABO) section and practice more ROP. The first ABO exercise was a straight-forward buffer overflow.

A lot of programming languages, like C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, etc, have exception support. In the event of an exception, the program searches back through the stack of function calls until an exception handler is found. Actually, the pointers to the exception handler are stored in the stack frame of each function. So, in effect, we have a function pointer on the stack that we can overwrite if we have a buffer overflow.

While doing a JavaScript exploit I encountered that there isn’t a convenient function in JavaScript to set specific code to a specific offset in a given string.

I started gera’s exercises on format strings vulnerabilities. I am going to start on the stack next. This post will be my first ROP practice and it was fun :). The main purpose of “warming up the stack” exercises is to just bypass the canary. However, I wanted to make it harder and get a shell out of it.