Buffer Overflows for Dummies

Buffer Overflows are responsible for many vulnerabilities in operating systems and application programs, actually dating back to the famous Morris worm in 1988. Descriptions of buffer overflow exploitation techniques are, however, in many cases either only scratching the surface or quite technical, including program source code, assembler listings and debugger usage, which scares away a lot of people without a solid programming background. This paper tries to fill the gap between those two categories by striking a good balance between depth and breadth of the presentation, covering the stack smashing, frame pointer overwrite, return-into-libc, and heap based overflow techniques as well as possible countermeasures.