Praise for Exploiting Software

“Exploiting Software highlights the most critical part of the software quality problem. As it turns out, software quality problems are a major contributing factor to computer security problems. Increasingly, companies large and small depend on software to run their businesses every day. The current approach to software quality and security taken by software companies, system integrators, and internal development organizations is like driving a car on a rainy day with worn-out tires and no air bags. In both cases, the odds are that something bad is going to happen, and there is no protection for the occupant/owner. This book will help the reader understand how to make software quality part of the design—a key change from where we are today!”

         —Tony Scott
             Chief Technology Officer, IS&S
             General Motors Corporation

“It’s about time someone wrote a book to teach the good guys what the bad guys already know. As the computer security industry matures, books like Exploiting Software have a critical role to play.”

         —Bruce Schneier
             Chief Technology Officer
             Counterpane
             Author of Beyond Fear and Secrets and Lies

“Exploiting Software cuts to the heart of the computer security problem, showing why broken software presents a clear and present danger. Getting past the ‘worm of the day’ phenomenon requires that someone other than the bad guys understands how software is attacked. This book is a wake-up call for computer security.”

         —Elinor Mills Abreu
             Reuters’ correspondent

“Police investigators study how criminals think and act. Military strategists learn about the enemy’s tactics, as well as their weapons and personnel capabilities. Similarly, information security professionals need to study their criminals and enemies, so we can tell the difference between popguns and weapons of mass destruction. This book is a significant advance in helping the ‘white hats’ understand how the ‘black hats’ operate. Through extensive examples and ‘attack patterns,’ this book helps the reader understand how attackers analyze software and use the results of the analysis to attack systems. Hoglund and McGraw explain not only how hackers attack servers, but also how malicious server operators can attack clients (and how each can protect themselves from the other). An excellent book for practicing security engineers, and an ideal book for an undergraduate class in software security.”

         —Jeremy Epstein
             Director, Product Security & Performance
             webMethods, Inc.

“A provocative and revealing book from two leading security experts and world class software exploiters, Exploiting Software enters the mind of the cleverest and wickedest crackers and shows you how they think. It illustrates general principles for breaking software, and provides you a whirlwind tour of techniques for finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities, along with detailed examples from real software exploits. Exploiting Software is essential reading for anyone responsible for placing software in a hostile environment—that is, everyone who writes or installs programs that run on the Internet.”

         —Dave Evans, Ph.D.
             Associate Professor of Computer Science
             University of Virginia

“The root cause for most of today’s Internet hacker exploits and malicious software outbreaks are buggy software and faulty security software deployment. In Exploiting Software, Greg Hoglund and Gary McGraw help us in an interesting and provocative way to better defend ourselves against malicious hacker attacks on those software loopholes. The information in this book is an essential reference that needs to be understood, digested, and aggressively addressed by IT and information security professionals everywhere.”

         —Ken Cutler, CISSP, CISA
             Vice President, Curriculum Development & Professional Services,
             MIS Training Institute

“This book describes the threats to software in concrete, understandable, and frightening detail. It also discusses how to find these problems before the bad folks do. A valuable addition to every programmer’s and security person’s library!”

         —Matt Bishop, Ph.D.
             Professor of Computer Science
             University of California at Davis
             Author of Computer Security: Art and Science

“Whether we slept through software engineering classes or paid attention, those of us who build things remain responsible for achieving meaningful and measurable vulnerability reductions. If you can’t afford to stop all software manufacturing to teach your engineers how to build secure software from the ground up, you should at least increase awareness in your organization by demanding that they read Exploiting Software. This book clearly demonstrates what happens to broken software in the wild.”

         —Ron Moritz, CISSP
             Senior Vice President, Chief Security Strategist
             Computer Associates

“Exploiting Software is the most up-to-date technical treatment of software security I have seen. If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read. This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging, way. Hoglund and McGraw have done an excellent job of picking out the major ideas in software exploit and nicely organizing them to make sense of the software security jungle.”

         —George Cybenko, Ph.D.
             Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth
             Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Security and Privacy

“This is a seductive book. It starts with a simple story, telling about hacks and cracks. It draws you in with anecdotes, but builds from there. In a few chapters you find yourself deep in the intimate details of software security. It is the rare technical book that is a readable and enjoyable primer but has the substance to remain on your shelf as a reference. Wonderful stuff.”

         —Craig Miller, Ph.D.
             Chief Technology Officer for North America
             Dimension Data

“It’s hard to protect yourself if you don’t know what you’re up against. This book has the details you need to know about how attackers find software holes and exploit them—details that will help you secure your own systems.”

         —Ed Felten, Ph.D.
             Professor of Computer Science
             Princeton University

“If you worry about software and application vulnerability, Exploiting Software is a must-read. This book gets at all the timely and important issues surrounding software security in a technical, but still highly readable and engaging way.”
         —George Cybenko, Ph.D.
             Dorothy and Walter Gramm Professor of Engineering, Dartmouth
             Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Security and Privacy Magazine

“Exploiting Software is the best treatment of any kind that I have seen on the topic of software vulnerabilities.”
         —From the Foreword by Aviel D. Rubin
     ...

Average Customer Review: ( 30 customer reviews )
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Most of "Exploiting Software" reads more like a book proposal than a
completed work: too detailed in places (do we really need a dozen
pages on writing plugins for the IDA Pro Disassembler?), not detailed
enough in others, and generally not well organized. Far too often, the
reader is simply told that an exploit exists, and is then directed to
the original source for details. Worse, the original sources are often
white papers, personal web sites, and conference proceedings -- things
that are either hard to obtain, unlikely to be available for long, or
both. As a result, the reader learns nothing.

The preface to "Exploiting Software" explains that this is a companion
volume to "Building Secure Software," written by the same Gary McGraw
with another co-author, and this helps to explain the main failings of
this book. I must admit that the last two chapters, "Buffer overflow"
and "Rootkits", are better than the rest; they provide plenty of
concrete details. But two chapters aren't enough to vindicate this
fairly shallow work. For my money, I expect a book that can stand on its
own.

36 of 37 found the following review helpful:

Half of the storyAug 19, 2004
By Stuart Gardner "www.sdgardner.com"
I'm an IT auditor (my main interest area is systems software). The premise of the book, that application security is now the key risk area for exploits is spot on. Exploits of applications can be devestating. This book describes basic attacks on application software; unfortunately the level of detail varies from example to example making it a little difficult to follow. It does provide valuable examples for those developing software of potentail problem areas and common faults. It is is also of potential value in planning penetration tests. There is no real coverage of secure coding practices and how to integrate security into the development process though. The book is worth getting but provides far from exhaustive coverage of code expoitation.

37 of 42 found the following review helpful:

Im disappointedApr 23, 2004
By Joshua Santos
I admit it, I was expecting a lot of this book. I've seen one of the co-authors, hoglund, speak at various security conferences in the past, and he is one of the top minds in the industry. I was therefore very excited to find he was writing a book on "exploiting software".

That being said, I was led to believe that this book would actually teach me how to "exploit software" --- that is the title, isn't it? The first two chapters are kind of overview, talking about historical flaws in things like embedded processors, and then a lengthy tutorial on somewhat obscure topics, such as writing plugins for the popular belgian disassembler, IDA Pro. While this is all fine and dandy, at this point in the book you will start to read faster and think "when do I get to learn how to "exploit software", and write some friggen exploits?"

Well, I was hoping to find that content later in the book (obviously contributed by mr. hoglund), but all I found was some terse overviews on how these exploits are possible. NOT how to actually write them, or use them in practice. This is where I was letdown, and may I even say, misled by the marketing material for the book.

I do have to say, the final section on writing a windows xp rootkit does have some concrete examples, and is highly interesting and informative. But, it remains the only truly hands on and practical portion of the book. This book should have been titled, AND marketed as "The Theory of Software Exploitation + A Good Chapter On Rootkits".

29 of 34 found the following review helpful:

Quite disappointingMay 03, 2004

'Exploiting Software' is a quite disappointing book. It is not well organized and repeats itself very often, there's no thread and the authors always lose themselves in trivial things. Whenever it started to get interesting the book stopped short of going into details. The only slightly sophisticated chapters are the ones at the end, about buffer overflows and the XP rootkit.

I found that often code fragments are insufficiently described or not explained at all. This is a no-no in writing software, and it is all the more when writing a book about software (I can easily download some code and then wade through the code myself, what's the added value of the book?). On the other hand, simple tasks like appending a line to a Unix text file are explained exhaustively. Or, the book contains several pages about a code to display sampled data graphically. Why would I want to read this in a book about software exploits?

Overall, the book fails in the most important aspect: to bear the reader in mind. It seems that the authors just wanted to write a book, a thick book. Among the target audience mentioned in the book, i.e., programmers, consultants, managers etc. only programmers with absolutely no background in security may appreciate the book.

Go check the book carefully if you think about buying it. I give it two out of five stars just because of the final two chapters.

21 of 24 found the following review helpful:

Fires up the hacker in me!Apr 20, 2005
By Christos Partsenidis
Anyone who's been in network security long enough will tell you that the current state of products and `solutions' to security problems are woefully inadequate.

Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, content filters and anti-virus solutions are all reactive technologies, and as a result, they fail to address the primary cause of security vulnerabilities.

This root cause is bad software. Viruses, worms and hackers exploit vulnerabilities in the design and logic of software applications to compromise, destroy and otherwise take control of important information. Once you accept this fact, you'll realize that the only path to good security is to write better code.

`Exploiting Software - How to Break Code' is a book that fires up the hacker in me. It does not aim to teach you about the latest scanning tool, instead, it teaches you how to find and exploit vulnerabilities in systems. While many of the ideas in the book (such as the omnipresent buffer overflow) are not new, there is simply no literary comparison to the treatment given to them in this book.

Application security is one of the highest regarded and specialized technical services in the security industry, and thus, finding people (let alone books) that delve in-depth into the topic is rare and refreshing. The first day I used this book, I was on an application security project. The target application was a distributed database application running on SQL server with a web front-end.

I happened to have this book along with me, and while reading through it, the section on equivalent requests was something I hadn't tried - sure enough, 20 minutes later I had full control of the application and a very good impression of this book.

I particularly like the conceptual sections of this book, especially their idea of `attack patterns' - generic scenarios that often lead to compromise in systems. A thorough study of all these attack patterns will leave you a much better analyst than when you started out, and it definitely pays off when it comes to testing.

The book is also chock-a-block full of code, something that other books don't have the guts to do. Better yet, we're not talking about `hello world' stuff here, while reading the excellent chapter on root kits I finally realized that the device driver code I was trying out was way over my head. That's something you like to find, because it gives you something to learn.

The art of reverse engineering, disassembly, writing IDA-Pro plugins, black / white and grey-box techniques, advanced payload creation on multiple architectures - this book has it all. The only thing I can possibly say against it is that this it caters to a niche audience.

If you're not a coder or seriously into security however, large parts of the book may be inaccessible to you. However if you're a hacker, security tester or application developer and you don't own a copy of this book, you're not reaching your full potential.

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