Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits?

Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by crankyadmin on Saturday June 16, 2012 @01:40PM (#4121107)

Read as much as you can about assembly. Debuggers are your best friend. Pick a target (app, iPhone, xbox, whatever). Attach debugger and step through the code and learn possible entry vectors (buffer overflow, loading for arbitrary file i.e. pdfs, so forth). Once you have an entry vector you essentially have an exploit, the rest is developing that exploit to do something "useful".

Sorry for the shortness of this response, if people are interested I can throw together a couple of blog posts.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by dacilselig on Saturday June 16, 2012 @01:43PM (#4121116)

I would be interested in seeing some of those blogs

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by manish_gill on Saturday June 16, 2012 @03:21PM (#4121363)

That would be really nice. I actually started learning programming so I could become a better "h4x0r" (I was a kid). But then I discovered I liked making things a lot more. I'd be really fun to go back and learn the things that inspired me to play with a computer in the first place.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by DanBC on Saturday June 16, 2012 @04:32PM (#4121519)

For some (old, out of date) information you could have a look at Fravia's information.

(http://www.woodmann.com/fravia/)

This is ancient; and Fravia is dead, so updates are unlikely. Fravia was also Italian and the writing is, uh, sometimes hard to follow. But I include it because it gives insight to the frame of mind that is needed, and is comprehensive about the tools that used to be used.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia)

Someone putting together some blog posts for HN would be very much appreciated.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by xtracto on Saturday June 16, 2012 @06:07PM (#4121630)

Aahhh... Fravia and the "crackstore" were great places to get tuts about hacking/cracking in their time (e.g. tKC tuts where good to follow as a kid).

I still miss those days of SoftIce :). Good memories.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by jonnyscholes on Saturday June 16, 2012 @11:06PM (#4122101)

Anyone else frequent http://freaky.staticusers.net/ back in the day? I always found their forums full of goodies [esp if you were interested in hacking from or into osx / os9] - pity it seems to have been taken down! [google still has some of it though].

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by rboyd on Saturday June 16, 2012 @08:16PM (#4121860)

I too grew up reading Fravia and absolutely loved his tutorials. One nostalgic evening several months ago I went googling for his tutorials and was saddened to see he had passed.

I've been very curious ever since to know what he wrote in his last post, but unfortunately I can't read Italian and the online translation service I've tried seem to fail horribly. Are there any Italian speakers able to translate this for the rest of us?

http://beri.it/2009/08/28/fravia/

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by aestetix on Sunday June 17, 2012 @03:30AM (#4122444)

I cannot upvote this enough. Fravia was brilliant, also check out searchlores, where he views the internet as a binary. Beautiful, beautiful work.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by sitkack on Sunday June 17, 2012 @01:59AM (#4122348)

rip. His cracking, reversing and searching tutorials are an amazing body of work.

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by toemetoch on Sunday June 17, 2012 @07:02AM (#4122676)

I'd like to add an example from the old days: "Ralf Brown's Interrupt List" [link]. It's a list of interrupts used by various software packages with documented weaknesses (typically register range checks). Whenever I'd write an ISR I'd check the list to avoid collisions with other software. Others would use it for writing exploits, the list contains a plethora of attack vectors.

[link] http://www.ctyme.com/rbrown.htm

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by Maven911 on Saturday June 16, 2012 @03:49PM (#4121424)

Yes please do, and then submit to HN!

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by wasd on Saturday June 16, 2012 @02:01PM (#4121160)

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by orthecreedence on Saturday June 16, 2012 @11:32PM (#4122139)

"I will write blog posts if people support this notion."

"I support you writing blog posts on this matter."

Downvotes ensue.... Seriously?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by jamesbritt on Sunday June 17, 2012 @02:25AM (#4122375)

Doesn't upvoting the original comment suffice?

Do people really need to also write out their support?

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Re:Ask HN: How do you learn to develop exploits? by lyaunzbe on Saturday June 16, 2012 @01:53PM (#4121140)

+1 for the blog posts.

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