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

Executable and Linking Format (ELF) fundamentals

Before we dig into the various shellcode techniques, let's take some time to understand executable files within Linux. ELF is the Linux and Unix executable file type. This file type consists of a header and a data field. You can view this by using the command readelf on an executable file. For example, let's view this command on the nslookup program using the command readelf -a /bin/nslookup.

I am using the -a option, which will provide me with all the relevant information — this includes components such as the file header, program header, sections, symbols, and more. The following screenshot is a sample of just the ELF header.

Figure 5.2 – readelf output on nslookup displaying the ELF header

The ELF header contains very important information that is used by the Operating System (OS). This information tells the OS how to handle the file. Let's analyze some of these sections:

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