Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

By : Rishalin Pillay
5 (1)
Book Image

Offensive Shellcode from Scratch

5 (1)
By: Rishalin Pillay

Overview of this book

Shellcoding is a technique that is executed by many red teams and used in penetration testing and real-world attacks. Books on shellcode can be complex, and writing shellcode is perceived as a kind of "dark art." Offensive Shellcode from Scratch will help you to build a strong foundation of shellcode knowledge and enable you to use it with Linux and Windows. This book helps you to explore simple to more complex examples of shellcode that are used by real advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. You'll get to grips with the components of shellcode and understand which tools are used when building shellcode, along with the automated tools that exist to create shellcode payloads. As you advance through the chapters, you'll become well versed in assembly language and its various components, such as registers, flags, and data types. This shellcode book also teaches you about the compilers and decoders that are used when creating shellcode. Finally, the book takes you through various attacks that entail the use of shellcode in both Windows and Linux environments. By the end of this shellcode book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to understand the workings of shellcode and build your own exploits by using the concepts explored.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: Shellcode
5
Section 2: Writing Shellcode
8
Section 3: Countermeasures and Bypasses

Chapter 2: Assembly Language

There are various types of programming languages, and in this chapter, we will focus on the low-level variant that is often known as an assembler language. The assembly language has a close relationship with the architecture's machine code instructions and is unique to that machine. As a result, many machines use distinct assembly languages. Symbols are used to represent an operation or command in this form of language. Therefore, it's also known as symbolic machine code.

Due to the reliance on machine code, assembly language is tailored to single computer architectures. You will find assembly language for architectures such as x86, x64, and ARM.

In this chapter, we will discuss the following topics:

  • Demystifying assembly language
  • Types of assembly language
  • Identifying the elements of assembly language