The following article provides in detail the different method on which exploiting of security vulnerabilities relies. The article explains what are, and how to exploit Stack overflows and Heap overflow. This article is a great asset to both novice and advance security professionals.
Credit:
The complete article can be accessed by going to: http://ouah.sysdoor.net/bofstd.pdf
The information has been provided by Pierre-Alain FAYOLLE and Vincent GLAUME.
Introduction:
"On November 2, 1988 a new form of threat appeared with the Morris Worm, also known as the Internet Worm. This famous event caused heavy damages on the internet, by using two common UNIX programs, sendmail, and fingerd. This was possible by exploiting a buffer overflow in fingerd. This is probably one of the most outstanding attacks based on buffer overflows.
This kind of vulnerability has been found on largely spread and used daemons such as bind, wu-ftpd, or various telnetd implementations, as well as on applications such as Oracle or MS Outlook Express...
The variety of vulnerable programs and possible ways to exploit them make clear that buffer overflows represent a real threat. Generally, they allow an attacker to get a shell on a remote machine, or to obtain superuser rights. Buffer overflows are commonly used in remote or local exploits.
The first aim of this document is to present how buffer overflows work and may compromise a system or a network security, and to focus on some existing protection solutions. Finally, Pierre-Alain FAYOLLE and Vincent GLAUME will try to point out the most interesting sets to secure an environment, and compare them on criteria such as efficiency or performance loss.
Pierre-Alain FAYOLLE and Vincent GLAUME are both third year computer science students at ENSEIRB (French national school of engineering), specialized in Networks and Distributed Systems. This study has been performed during our Network Administration project."
