Will the Code You Write Today Headline Tomorrow's BugTraq Mail List?

• Includes Numbered-by-Line Exploit Code Examples That Illustrate the Differences Between Stack Overflows, Heap Corruption, and Format String Bugs

• Provides Case Studies for Most Major Platforms and Environments, Including Windows, FreeBSD, FrontPage, and Linux

• Avoid Worm or Custom Exploits by Analyzing Your Source Code to Detect Buffer Overflow Vulnerabilities

Forensic investigations of notorious Internet attacks, such as the SQL Slammer and Blaster Worms, reveal buffer overflows to be the sophisticated hacker's "vulnerability of choice". These worms crippled the Internet and cost billions of dollars to clean up. Now, even more powerful and insidious threats have appeared in the form of "custom exploits". These one-time only exploits are custom crafted to attack your enterprise, making them even more difficult to detect and defend. No catchy names, no media coverage; just your own personal disaster.

James C. Foster's Buffer Overflow Attacks clearly demonstrates that the only way to defend against the endless variety of buffer overflow attacks is to implement a comprehensive design, coding and test plan for all of your applications. From Dave Aitel's Foreword through the last appendix, this is the only book dedicated exclusively to detecting, exploiting, and preventing buffer overflow attacks.

CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK INCLUDE

Buffer Overflows: The Essentials

Understanding Shellcode

Writing Shellcode

Win32 Assembly

Case Study: FreeBSD NN Exploit Code

Case Study: xlockmore User Supplied Format String Vulnerability (CVE-2000-0763)

Case Study: FrontPage Denial of Service Utilizing WinSock

Stack Overflows

Heap Corruption

Format String Attacks

Windows Buffer Overflows

Case Study: cURL buffer overflow on Linux

Case Study: OpenSSL SSLv2 Malformed Client Key Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CAN-2002-0656)

Case Study: X11R6 4.2 XLOCALEDIR Overflow

Case Study: Microsoft MDAC Denial of Service

Case Study: Local UUX Buffer Overflow on HPUX

Finding Buffer Overflows in Source

Case Study: InlineEgg I

Case Study: InlineEgg II

Case Study: Seti@Home Exploit Code

Case Study: Microsoft CodeBlue Exploit Code

The Complete Data Conversion Table

Useful Syscalls

Additional Exploit References

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 6 Ratings

Proofread? Editorial and Technical reveiw?.... - 2006-03-04
Reviewer Rating:
For a book dedicated to such an important topic, my experience with this book was at best disappointing. This goes both for the authors (as they are primarily responsible for the material), as well as the publisher (Syngress). One would doubt whether the book has gone through any meaningful editorial review process. The errata posted on Syngress' site (bad site-design with a great deal of broken URLs in the book's relevant-links page by the way, and one "has to" sign up to obtain the errata) are utterly incomplete. The book at the time of this writing lacks an accompanying website (no reference in the errata or in the book itself).

This is an unfortunate development that one certainly notices in the recent publications pertaining to security topic, perhaps as a result of the urge to push content out to satisfy the hot-market demands.

On the technical front, the choice for the topics seems to be reasonably covering most corners; however, throughout the book there's a focus on pre-SP2 release of Microsoft Windows XP; why? If one of the objectives of the authors was to educate the audience on the topics (by providing practical and working examples), wouldn't such choice defeat the purpose?

Disturbing - 2005-02-27
Reviewer Rating:
This book upset me. Not really the book itself, that's great, but what it implies: that this type of exploit hasn't gone away. I thought things were getting better, but the author explains that is an illusion: it's just that the reporting slacked off.

It is hard to believe that programmers keep making the same mistakes over and over again. This book shows what those mistakes are and how hackers exploit them. You need a good understanding of assembly language to get much out of this, but if you do have that background, this is a real eye-opener.

Extremely detailed, and some of this is a bit of a reach for me (it's been many a year since I did any C or Assembler), but it is fascinating, though in the same sense that watching a tiger stalk you would be: it's scary.

Certainly recommended for people who are writing code today, and I hope more of them pay attention, though the authors attitude seems to be that these problems will continue to plague us.

Full of errors and inconsistencies - 2008-07-29
Reviewer Rating:
Does Syngress (the publisher) employ proof readers?

I doubt it. This book is so full of errors and inaccuracies that it becomes painful to read after a while. Especially the annotated examples, where the line numbers for the code listings often bear no relation to the line numbers listed in the accompanying analysis.

And then there's the confusion of ESP and EIP in several places throughout the book. For a collection of 'expert information' it comes off as a rather amateurish production. Makes you wonder... what else have they got wrong?

You'll notice this is very much the same as the review I've posted for "Sockets, Shellcode, Porting & Coding"... that is because it too is horrendous for errors.

This is 2 books from Syngress I've got that are very poor quality. What's going on guys?

Great book to start with. - 2006-09-14
Reviewer Rating:
This is a great book to start understanding buffer overflows with. You do need some fimiliarity with assembly or you are not going to understand the code that is through out this book, almost every other page.

This gives step by step examples in reading, creating and disassembling shellcode and buffer overflows. I'v read some of the other reviews which suggest their was not much proof reading done it seems like it. I myself found many spelling erros but technical wise I have yet to see any. Maybe my second read I will find some.

Finally a book on BO attacks - 2005-03-30
Reviewer Rating:
Buffer overflow attacks have been around for over 30 years, finally there is a book on the topic.

this is a valuable title and worth the wait!

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