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

Data execution prevention

Introduced in Windows XP, Server 2003, and later, DEP provides system-level protection for memory. It provides memory protections by marking one or more memory pages as non-executable, thus blocking code from executing from that memory region.

If an application attempts to run code from that protected memory page, an access violation will occur. You may have seen these types of error messages, such as STATUS_ACCESS_VIOLATION. Now if there were a case where the program would need to run code from that protected memory page, the procedure to do that would entail setting correct protection attributes. These attributes are PAGE_EXECUTE, PAGE_EXECUTE_READ, PAGE_EXECUTE_READ_WRITE, and PAGE_EXECUTE_WRITECOPY. As you work on application disassembly in the Bypassing countermeasures section coming up, keep an eye out for these attributes.

Stack cookies

Stack cookies, also known as GS or GS++, are a stack overflow protection mechanism introduced by Microsoft...