A Guide to Kernel Exploitation Attacking the Core
A Guide to Kernel Exploitation Attacking the Core
I didn’t want to show up in the light dedicated to others whose hard work resulted
in the book you hold in your hands. However, after proofreading some of the
book’s chapters I realized that it would be sad to miss the opportunity, and that it
is a great honor to write a few words in a book authored by two of the world’s
best kernel exploit developers.
I rarely read books about exploitation techniques because they usually provide
little or outdated knowledge or simply enumerate exploits done by others. Additionally,
books cannot provide the learning effect of hands-on exploit development
or the fun of a ‘#’ prompt after days of hard work, especially if a kernel vulnerability
is exploited. It’s about time that someone transformed this feeling into
paper with the benefit of saving other developers time, a lot of crashes, and
headaches.
Besides all the nice tricks and exploitation martial arts, writing exploits, and
kernel exploits in particular, is engineering that requires a deep understanding of
operating system fundamentals. This book is definitely helpful for such purposes
and fills the gap between all the kernel and driver programming books on my
bookshelf.
I know for sure who around the world will read this book, and I hope that a
lot of kernel and driver developers are among that readership. My next kernel
code review job will definitely come, and I hope my printed copy of this book
arrives before it does.
Sebastian Krahmer
System programmer and exploit engineer
This book is dedicated to all those that still believe that when it comes to security,
your ability with your code editor (and shell) is more important than your ability
with your mail client.
Various people helped, supported, and patiently nurtured this manuscript
through to a final product. Simply stated, without them, what you are holding in
your hands right now (or checking through your favorite PDF reader) would not
have been possible. We would like in particular to thank:
• Matthew Cater, Rachel Roumeliotis, Graham Speake, Audrey Doyle, and Julie
Ochs for putting up (more than once) with a dancing schedule and our
constant requests to increase the number of pages from the original estimate.
• Nemo for his amazing material for Chapter 5 and the constant feedback.
• Ruggiero Piazzolla, for helping with the website and especially, for making it
easy on the eyes.
• Marco Desiati and Michele Mastrosimone for helping with the art.
Our original attempts looked like childish sketches compared to their final
results.
• Abh for tirelessly spending lots of his time proofreading, reviewing, and
improving the contents and code examples contained in this book.
• Sebastian Krahmer for contributing the Foreword, reviewing many of the
chapters, and for the endless discussions about techniques and ideas.
• (In random order) Andrea Lelli, Scott Rotondo, xorl (nice blog, btw!), Brad
Spengler, Window Snyder, Julien Vanegue, Josh Hall, Ryan Austin, Bas
Albert, Igor Falcomata’, clint, Reina Alessandro, Giorgio Fedon, Matteo
Meucci, Stefano Di Paola, Antonio Parata, Francesco Perna, Alfredo Pesoli,
Gilad Bakas, David Jacoby, and Ceresoni Andrea for sending feedback and
ideas about the book and helping to improve its overall quality (and,
occasionally, providing a bed or a couch to crash on). We are sure we have
forgotten others here (never has the sentence “you know who you are” been
more appropriate)…sorry about that.
Last but not least, there are a few special thanks missing, but they are personal,
rather than shared.
Enrico would like to thank Mike Pogue and Jan Setje-Eilers for, well, just
about everything they have done and Lalla, Franco, and Michela for being a fantastic
family. A special thanks goes to the 9:00 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. phone calls,
which have made living (thousands of) miles away from home much, much closer
to Home.
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