BFH Exploiting & Defense Course

I am given the opportunity to teach Exploiting & Defense in the Bern University of Applied Sciences (Berner Fachhochschule) in the module Application and Software-Security.

In seven afternoons, each four lessons, I’m giving a complete overview of the Art of Exploitation, and the defensive measures which are available today. Topics include:

• Day 1:
  • Computer technology basics
  • The ELF format and memory mappings
• Day 2:
  • x86 function call convention
  • x86 Assembler Intro
  • How to build shellcode
• Day 3:
  • Stack based buffer overflows and their exploitation
• Day 4:
  • Exploit mitigation’s (Stack Canary, DEP, ASLR, PIE)
  • Secure coding
• Day 5:
  • How to defeat exploit mitigation’s (e.g. return-to-libc, information disclosure)
  • PIE exploit mitigation
• Day 6:
  • Return oriented programming (ROP)
  • Windows exploiting
  • Fuzzing
• Day 7:
  • Use-After-Free Heap exploiting
  • Contemporary exploiting case study (Browser Exploits, Fuzzing, etc.)

All the Slides are also available: E&D BFH 2017 Slides

For this mandate, I also created a website with an interactive exploit challenges environment called exploit.courses. It provides:

• Vulnerable programs and their exploits
• An environment where the exploits can be started (LXD container in a QEMU VM)
• Writeups on how to exploit the programs
• A Browser based Linux terminal emulator (no need for an SSH client)

The code is available on github; web, server, lxd-server. It leverages the Ubuntu LXD container technologies to implement most of its features.