Buffer overflows; the way i see it

Towards the beginning of this month, i was part of a team that had taken part in the CIPHER 5 capture the flag competition; due to lack of experience and preparation we had failed to fare well in it; we came out 22nd out of 32 worldwide.

However, buffer overflows was a topic i did not manage to cover fully during the preps for the competition; so i continued my work on it even after the it. My work is mainly on the Linux distro named DVL – Damn Vulnerable Linux(you mite wanna google it out if you have`nt heard of it);  its a linux distro based on backtrack which has got vulnerable apps of many various kinds which are excellent for practice. It was referred to me by Marcus J. Carey, a security auditor who has helped me in numerous occasions.

Now, i don`t pretend to be an expert on buffer overflows; i`d rate myself intermediate. However, i`ll mention a few guidelines you could follow which might help you at exploiting overflows. SO, here are the references(please let me know if there are better ones)
1. Try reading `bout buffer overflows on wikipedia.
2. Video tutorials on “Assembly programming in Linux” which`ll explain the basics of memory management and assembly programming on an Intel x86 system by Vivek Ramachandran.(1-7 is enough). Neat work.
3.Video tutorials on “Exploiting buffer overflows” by Vivek Ramachandran(1-5). Neat again(but a bit slow).
4.Try reading “Smashing the Stack” ; an excellent article by aleph1 which was published in the Phrack magazine.

Now, once you are done with all that you could try out DVL(i used DVL 1.4); i`d suggest you go through the challenges in the -

/dvl/exploitmes_package_04/

directory before going through the others. After going through all the above tutorials the challenges in that directory should be a breeze.;-) However, if you still find trouble there are a nicely written tut`s in that directory itself. I strongly advice you not to go through them in the beginning.

So what am i upto now? Well, i`ll let you know when i`m done with that…

P.S. if you wanna know how to download videos from www.securitytube.net , read this.