Exploiting Software: How to Break Code by Greg Hoglund, Gary McGraw, Aviel D. Rubin (Foreword by)

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
To protect your software, first understand why it’s vulnerable. Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw have toured all of your software’s potential weaknesses -- and they’re worse than you think.

The authors systematically introduce “attack patterns”: today’s most common blueprints for exploiting vulnerabilities. You’ll take a detailed look at reverse engineering: what crackers are looking for, and how automation makes them even more dangerous.

Buffer overflows have rarely been considered in this depth before. You’ll also find excellent coverage of rootkits, malicious input, and attacks targeted specifically at clients or servers.

If you’re buying this book, you should know about McGraw’s Building Secure Software, a companion title focused solely on solutions. Whether you’re a developer, security pro, or ethical hacker, you need them both. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2003 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.

From the Publisher

Praise for Exploiting Software

“Exploiting Software highlights the most critical part of the software quality problem. As it turns out, software quality problems are a major contributing factor to computer security problems. Increasingly, companies large and small depend on software to run their businesses every day. The current approach to software quality and security taken by software companies, system integrators, and internal development organizations is like driving a car on a rainy day with worn-out tires and no air bags. In both cases, the odds are that something bad is going to happen, and there is no protection for the occupant/owner. This book will help the reader understand how to make software quality part of the design—a key change from where we are today!”

“It’s about time someone wrote a book to teach the good guys what the bad guys already know. As the computer security industry matures, books like Exploiting Software have a critical role to play.”

“Exploiting Software cuts to the heart of the computer security problem, showing why broken software presents a clear and present danger. Getting past the ‘worm of the day’ phenomenon requires that someone other than the bad guys understands how software is attacked. This book is a wake-up call for computer security.”

“Police investigators study how criminals think and act. Military strategists learn about the enemy’s tactics, as well as their weapons and personnel capabilities. Similarly, information security professionals need to study their criminals and enemies, so we can tell the difference between popguns and weapons of mass destruction. This book is a significant advance in helping the ‘white hats’ understand how the ‘black hats’ operate. Through extensive examples and ‘attack patterns,’ this book helps the reader understand how attackers analyze software and use the results of the analysis to attack systems. Hoglund and McGraw explain not only how hackers attack servers, but also how malicious server operators can attack clients (and how each can protect themselves from the other). An excellent book for practicing security engineers, and an ideal book for an undergraduate class in software security.”

“A provocative and revealing book from two leading security experts and world class software exploiters, Exploiting Software enters the mind of the cleverest and wickedest crackers and shows you how they think. It illustrates general principles for breaking software, and provides you a whirlwind tour of techniques for finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, along with detailed examples from real software exploits. Exploiting Software is essential reading for anyone responsible for placing software in a hostile environment—that is, everyone who writes or installs programs that run on the Internet.”

“The root cause for most of today’s Internet hacker exploits and malicious software outbreaks are buggy software and faulty security software deployment. In Exploiting Software, Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw help us in an interesting and provocative way to better defend ourselves against malicious hacker attacks on those software loopholes. The information in this book is an essential reference that needs to be understood, digested, and aggressively addressed by IT and information security professionals everywhere.”

“This book describes the threats to software in concrete, understandable, and frightening detail. It also discusses how to find these problems before the bad folks do. A valuable addition to every programmer’s and security person’s library!”

“Whether we slept through software engineering classes or paid attention, those of us who build things remain responsible for achieving meaningful and measurable vulnerability reductions. If you can’t afford to stop all software manufacturing to teach your engineers how to build secure software from the ground up, you should at least increase awareness in your organization by demanding that they read Exploiting Software. This book clearly demonstrates what happens to broken software in the wild.”

“Exploiting Software is the most up-to-date technical treatment of software security I have seen. If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read. This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging, way. Hoglund and McGraw have done an excellent job of picking out the major ideas in software exploit and nicely organizing them to make sense of the software security jungle.”

“This is a seductive book. It starts with a simple story, telling about hacks and cracks. It draws you in with anecdotes, but builds from there. In a few chapters you find yourself deep in the intimate details of software security. It is the rare technical book that is a readable and enjoyable primer but has the substance to remain on your shelf as a reference. Wonderful stuff.”

“It’s hard to protect yourself if you don’t know what you’re up against. This book has the details you need to know about how attackers find software holes and exploit them—details that will help you secure your own systems.”

“If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read. This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging way.”
         —George Cybenko, Ph.D.
             Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth
             Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine

“Exploiting Software is the best treatment of any kind that I have seen on the topic of software vulnerabilities.”
         —From the Foreword by Aviel D. Rubin
             Associate Professor, Computer Science
              Technical Director, Information Security Institute, Johns Hopkins University

How does software break? How do attackers make software break on purpose? Why are firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software not keeping out the bad guys? What tools can be used to break software? This book provides the answers.

Exploiting Software is loaded with examples of real attacks, attack patterns, tools, and techniques used by bad guys to break software. If you want to protect your software from attack, you must first learn how real attacks are really carried out.

This must-have book may shock you—and it will certainly educate you.Getting beyond the script kiddie treatment found in many hacking books, you will learn about

• Why software exploit will continue to be a serious problem
• When network security mechanisms do not work
• Attack patterns
• Reverse engineering
• Classic attacks against server software
• Surprising attacks against client software
• Techniques for crafting malicious input
• The technical details of buffer overflows
• Rootkits

Exploiting Software is filled with the tools, concepts, and knowledge necessary to break software.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Software security is gaining momentum as security professionals realize that computer security is really all about making software behave. The publication of Building Secure Software in 2001 (Viega and McGraw) unleashed a number of related books that have crystallized software security as a critical field. Already, security professionals, software developers, and business leaders are resonating with the message and asking for more.

Building Secure Software (co-authored by McGraw) is intended for software professionals ranging from developers to managers, and is aimed at helping people develop more secure code. Exploiting Software is useful to the same target audience, but is really intended for security professionals interested in how to find new flaws in software. This book should be of particular interest to security practitioners working to beef up their software security skills, including red teams and ethical hackers.

Exploiting Software is about how to break code. Our intention is to provide a realistic view of the technical issues faced by security professionals. This book is aimed directly toward software security as opposed to network security. As security professionals come to grips with the software security problem, they need to understand how software systems break.

Solutions to each of the problems discussed in Exploiting Software can be found in Building Secure Software. The two books are mirror images of each other.

We believe that software security and application security practitioners are in for a reality check. The problem is that simple and popular approaches being hawked by upstart "applicationsecurity" vendors as solutions—such as canned black box testing tools—barely scratch the surface. This book aims to cut directly through the hype to the heart of the matter. We need to get real about what we're up against. This book describes exactly that.

This book closely examines many real-world software exploits, explaining how and why they work, the attack patterns they are based on, and in some cases how they were discovered. Along the way, this book also shows how to uncover new software vulnerabilities and how to use them to break machines.

Chapter 1 describes why software is the root of the computer security problem. We introduce the trinity of trouble—complexity, extensibility, and connectivity—and describe why the software security problem is growing. We also describe the future of software and its implications for software exploit.

Chapter 2 describes the difference between implementation bugs and architectural flaws. We discuss the problem of securing an open system, and explain why risk management is the only sane approach. Two real-world exploits are introduced: one very simple and one technically complex. At the heart of Chapter 2 is a description of attack patterns. We show how attack patterns fit into the classic network security paradigm and describe the role that attack patterns play in the rest of the book.

The subject of Chapter 3 is reverse engineering. Attackers disassemble, decompile, and deconstruct programs to understand how they work and how they can be made not to. Chapter 3 describes common gray box analysis techniques, including the idea of using a security patch as an attack map. We discuss Interactive Disassembler (IDA), the state-of-the-art tool used by hackers to understand programs. We also discuss in detail how real cracking tools are built and used.

In Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7, we discuss particular attack examples that provide instances of attack patterns. These examples are marked with an asterisk.

Chapters 4 and 5 cover the two ends of the client-server model. Chapter 4 begins where the book Hacking Exposed McClure et al., 1999 leaves off, discussing trusted input, privilege escalation, injection, path tracing, exploiting trust, and other attack techniques specific to server software. Chapter 5 is about attacking client software using in-band signals, cross-site scripting, and mobile code. The problem of backwash attacks is also introduced. Both chapters are studded with attack patterns and examples of real attacks.

Chapter 6 is about crafting malicious input. It goes far beyond standard-issue "fuzzing" to discuss partition analysis, tracing code, and reversing parser code. Special attention is paid to crafting equivalent requests using alternate encoding techniques. Once again, both real-world example exploits and the attack patterns that inspire them are highlighted throughout.

The whipping boy of software security, the dreaded buffer overflow, is the subject of Chapter 7. This chapter is a highly technical treatment of buffer overflow attacks that leverages the fact that other texts supply the basics. We discuss buffer overflows in embedded systems, database buffer overflows, buffer overflow as targeted against Java, and content-based buffer overflows. Chapter 7 also describes how to find potential buffer overflows of all kinds, including stack overflows, arithmetic errors, format string vulnerabilities, heap overflows, C++ vtables, and multistage trampolines. Payload architecture is covered in detail for a number of platforms, including x86, MIPS, SPARC, and PA-RISC. Advanced techniques such as active armor and the use of trampolines to defeat weak security mechanisms are also covered. Chapter 7 includes a large number of attack patterns.

Chapter 8 is about rootkits—the ultimate apex of software exploit. This is what it means for a machine to be "owned." Chapter 8 centers around code for a real Windows XP rootkit. We cover call hooking, executable redirection, hiding files and processes, network support, and patching binary code. Hardware issues are also discussed in detail, including techniques used in the wild to hide rootkits in EEPROM. A number of advanced rootkit topics top off Chapter 8.

As you can see, Exploiting Software runs the gamut of software risk, from malicious input to stealthy rootkits. Using attack patterns, real code, and example exploits, we clearly demonstrate the techniques that are used every day by real malicious hackers against software.

This book is useful to many different kinds of people: network administrators, security consultants, information warriors, developers, and security programmers.

• If you are responsible for a network full of running software, you should read this book to learn the kinds of weaknesses that exist in your system and how they are likely to manifest.
• If you are a security consultant, you should read this book so you can effectively locate, understand, and measure security holes in customer systems.
• If you are involved in offensive information warfare, you should use this book to learn how to penetrate enemy systems through software.
• If you create software for a living, you should read this book to understand how attackers will approach your creation. Today, all developers should be security minded. The knowledge here will arm you with a real understanding of the software security problem.
• If you are a security programmer who knows your way around code, you will love this book.

The primary audience for this book is the security programmer, but there are important lessons here for all computer professionals.

It's important to emphasize that none of the information we discuss here is news to the hacker community. Some of these techniques are as old as the hills. Our real objective is to provide some eye-opening information and up the level of discourse in software security.

Some security experts may worry that revealing the techniques described in this book will encourage more people to try them out. Perhaps this is true, but hackers have always had better lines of communication and information sharing than the good guys. This information needs to be understood and digested by security professionals so that they know the magnitude of the problem and they can begin to address it properly. Shall we grab the bull by the horns or put our head in the sand?

Perhaps this book will shock you. No matter what, it will educate you.