Linux Exploits & Mitigation: Memory and Pointer Vulnerabilities

Overview/Description
Expected Duration
Lesson Objectives
Course Number
Expertise Level

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Overview/Description
Memory and pointer vulnerabilities come from a number of common programmer mistakes. Being able to recognize, debug, and fix unsafe memory allocation and access errors is essential to avoiding vulnerabilities. In this course, you'll explore how memory and pointer vulnerabilities arise and how they lead to program errors and exploits. You'll look at how memory is allocated and accessed in a typical C program. You'll investigate what causes heap and stack overflows, use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities, and out-of-bounds access errors. In addition, you'll recognize dangling pointers, NULL dereferences, and off-by-one loops. Finally, you'll delve into how coding errors lead to corrupted memory and arbitrary code execution.

Expected Duration (hours)
1.2

Lesson Objectives

Linux Exploits & Mitigation: Memory and Pointer Vulnerabilities

discover the key concepts covered in this course

describe methods and goals for allocating memory

investigate what it means to overflow the heap

recognize and avoid dangling pointers in a C program

recognize and avoid null dereferences in a C program

investigate what it means to exploit the heap

illustrate use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities

recognize and avoid stack buffer overflows

describe the nature of out-of-bounds write vulnerabilities and their impact

recognize and avoid looping off-by-one in a C program

describe how coding errors and vulnerabilities lead to corrupting memory

illustrate how to execute arbitrary code introduced by coding errors

illustrate how out-of-bounds errors are exploited

summarize the key concepts covered in this course

Course Number:
it_cylxexdj_04_enus

Expertise Level
Expert