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!" --Tony Scott Chief Technology Officer, IS&S General Motors Corporation "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." --Bruce Schneier Chief Technology Officer Counterpane Author of "Beyond Fear and Secrets and Lies ""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." --Elinor Mills Abreu Reuters' correspondent "Police investigators study how criminals think and act. Military strategists learn about the enemy's tactics, as well as their weapons andpersonnel 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

Greg Hoglund has been a pioneer in the area of software security. He is CEO of HBGary, Inc., a leading provider of software security verification services. After writing one of the first network vulnerability scanners (installed in over half of all Fortune 500 companies), he created and documented the first Windows NT-based rootkit, founding rootkit.com in the process. Greg is a frequent speaker at Black Hat, RSA, and other security conferences.

Gary McGraw, Cigital's CTO, is a leading authority on software security. Dr. McGraw is coauthor of the groundbreaking books Building Secure Software and Exploiting Software (both from Addison-Wesley). While consulting for major software producers and consumers, he has published over ninety peer-reviewed technical publications, and functions as principal investigator on grants from DARPA, the National Science Foundation, and NIST's Advanced Technology Program. He serves on the advisory boards of Authentica, Counterpane, and Fortify Software. He is also an advisor to the computer science departments at University of California, Davis, and the University of Virginia, as well as the School of Informatics at Indiana University.

Software security is gaining momentum as security professionals realize that computer security is really all about making software behave. The publication ofBuilding Secure Softwarein 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 Softwareis 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 Softwareis 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 inExploiting Softwarecan 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 "application security" 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. What This Book Is About 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 bookHacking ExposedMcClure et al., 1999 leaves off, discussing trusted input, privilege escalation, injection, path tracing, exploiting trust, and other attack t