Gray Hat Hacking The Ethical Hacker's Handbook, Fourth Edition, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 19

 

One-Day Exploitation with Patch Diffing

In response to the lucrative growth of vulnerability research, the interest level in the binary diffing of patched vulnerabilities continues to rise. Privately disclosed and internally discovered vulnerabilities typically offer limited technical details. The process of binary diffing can be compared to a treasure hunt, where researchers are given limited information about the location and details of a vulnerability, or “buried treasure.” Given the proper skills and tools, a researcher can locate and identify the code changes and then develop a working exploit.

            In this chapter, we cover the following topics:

            •  Application and patch diffing

            •  Binary diffing ...