Live data from Hacker News

Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

phrack.org

61–66 of 66 posts

Re: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

#61

What a classic! Phrack stopped publishing some time ago but the world of security ploughs on, who can recommend similar modern resources to Phrack? Here's a few I'm aware of: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ https://secret.club/

Google Project Zero has an excellent blog: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/

Re: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. So hush is the only privacy coin in your opinion?

No, there are many privacy coins, but most are indeed just copies of Monero or Zcash. The author of that paper has discovered multiple CVE's in Zcash ( https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-16930/ and https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2019-11636/ ). There are very few unique source codebases which implement privacy coins, maybe a half dozen depending on how lenient you are (i.e. is DASH a privacy coin? Barely, but…

So why would one pick Hush over other coins like Zcash? Because of less metadata leakage?

What I am trying to get at is, what value does Hush have in the real world? It's a privacy coin cool, but how can it be adopted/used by institutions etc. And if the tech is so great why is no one using it right now?

Re: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

#64
post #59

Does someone know why weren't stack overflow exploits more common in the early 90s? If the Morris worm used them in 88, how did the technique get lost until this phrack article come out? Makes me wonder if there are still entire classes of exploits that are undiscovered out there.

This is a big question in vulnerability research! A previous thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6656303

Since then, I've talked to some people I trust who say they were exploiting overflows prior to 1995 (by like a year or so), so it was in the air before then, but I haven't seen much evidence that anything like a full-fledged stack overflow had been exploited in the 5 years between '88 and '95.

(Also: Neil Woods tweeted the 8lgm syslog shellcode, which was pretty rad: https://twitter.com/tqbf/status/1332579786682724354).

Re: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

#65

What a classic! Phrack stopped publishing some time ago but the world of security ploughs on, who can recommend similar modern resources to Phrack? Here's a few I'm aware of: https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/ https://secret.club/

International Journal of Proof-of-Concept or Get The Fuck Out (PoC||GTFO or PoC or GTFO)

https://www.alchemistowl.org/pocorgtfo/

Re: Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit (1996)

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. If you can overwrite the return address, and you have some time to plan out your payload in advance, you can write a program by “returning” into other bits of the program or its libraries.

Return Oriented Programming (ROP) can bypass the non-executable stack protection, since existing "gadgets" from program memory are executed rather than attacker-provided shellcode. However the stack protection will probably require a separate information leak (to find the canary value) or arbitrary write (to overwrite it) to bypass. Unless the attacker is fortunate to find an unprotected function which the compiler m…

> Unless the attacker is fortunate to find an unprotected function which the compiler missed,

Every instance of the bytes C3, CB, C2 or CA in the executable page could potentially be abused, via carefully-chosen instruction alignment.

Post reply on HN