Linux Exploit Development

In order to approach Linux binary exploitation, we need to get to know the target. In order to do that, we need suitable tools.

As information gathering is the most important part of every penetration testing activity, including binary exploitation, it is very important to know how to make use of tools that will help us recognize what is happening inside the target binaries.

Contrary to Windows, where most applications are bgraphical interface-oriented, on Linux, and most of the tools used in Linux Exploitation, you will come across command line terminals.

Linux’s default debugger is gdb. It comes preinstalled with most Linux distributions; otherwise, it is accessible via:

sudo apt-get install gdb

In order to improve visibility of the gdb results, there are numerous plugins available on the web that were written by the community and shared publicly. Some of them are PEDA and pwndbg. For this course, we will use PEDA. PEDA can be easily downloaded and set up. The GitHub repository for it can be found at the following address:

https://github.com/longld/peda