Protostar: Stack5
Overview I wanted to learn more about the fundamentals behind performing a buffer overflow, or "Stack Smashing" attack. This is a pretty common attack and no modern system would really have this type of vulnerability. Still, this is a good way to gain some beginners knowledge of reversing with GDB and the x86 assembly language, and because I am a diehard academic, lets dive in! Overview of Buffer Overflows Following the Exploit exercises site here , we downloaded the Protostar VM. I started at Stack5, because Stack0-4 were relatively simple. Stack5 is recreating a standard buffer overflow using shellcode as a payload. The source code includes nothing except for a simple 64 Byte buffer that you are supposed to overflow. This was my introduction to using any type of shellcode related exploit, so I have included links for my own reference. A snip of the source code for this exercise Crafting the Payload Metasploit and MsfPayload are command-line too