In the realm of cybersecurity, your journey mirrors that of a martial artist mastering the art of defense and attack. The “Program Security” module is where you will train in the ancient techniques of shellcoding and memory corruption. Like a skilled martial artist wielding precise strikes, you will learn to craft shellcode that slips past defenses with the agility of a shadow. You will also study memory corruption vulnerabilities, discovering how to exploit pinpoint weaknesses with the precision of a pressure point strike.
Follow along with a live class with the same demo the instructor used.
Exploitation begins at the intersection of two core ideas: corrupting program memory and gaining control-flow. Memory corruption provides the foothold, allowing control over a program’s execution by overwriting critical data such as return addresses or other valuable pointers. Shellcode provides the payload, a carefully crafted sequence of instructions designed to carry out specific actions once execution is redirected. When combined, these concepts illustrate the foundation of software exploitation: not just crashing a program, but deliberately shaping its behavior to execute attacker-controlled code.
