Where We Are: From Offense to Defense
- Classes 01—04: we attacked — stack overflows, overwriting the saved return address, injecting shellcode.
- That world assumed: writable + executable stack, fixed addresses, no integrity checks.
- Real systems fight back. Every classic technique triggered a mitigation; every mitigation triggered a bypass.
- Today: the layered defenses on a modern binary, what each stops, and how each is defeated.
Key Takeaway
Modern exploitation is not one trick — it is chaining bypasses of several independent defenses. Know the defenses to know the attacks.