"A Bug Hunter's Diary": simple idea, effectively executed

Tobias Klein's A Bug Hunter's Diary is a simple idea which Klein carries through to execution quite well.

The book is structured as a series of 7 separate chapters; each chapter relates the story of how Klein:

• Searches for a vulnerability
• Isolates the vulnerability
• Develops a demonstration of the vulnerability
• Refines the demonstrated vulnerability to produce an exploit of the bug

Each chapter follows roughly the same structure, but the particulars and details of the vulnerability and its exploit are different each time.

Along the way, Klein includes information on extremely valuable tools and techniques, such as: how to use various debuggers to observe software in action; the various types of vulnerabilities such as stack overflows, heap overruns, out-of-range data, etc; how to find sample data files to use as input sources; how and when to write your own quick-and-dirty programs to enumerate possibilities or search for weaknesses, and how to disassemble code to understand its behavior.

Klein's choice of subjects is also impressively broad. The operating systems include Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, Linux, and iOS; the vulnerable software packages include operating systems, browsers, image processing libraries, and device drivers. This wide ranging approach might be rather overwhelming for a beginning programmer, but this book is not intended for a novice audience; as Klein states at the outset, "you should have a solid grasp of the C programming language and be familiar with x86 assembly."

Klein also provides thorough references and material for additional study; each chapter ends with detailed references and notes to enable the reader to pursue these topics more deeply. Indeed, since this sort of work is best done "hands on", Klein has, commendably, taken the time to precisely note the exact versions of the software he works with so that you can "follow along" on your own machine, setting up the vulnerable software and watching it crash, just as he did.

If you're tired of ordinary programming books, and looking for something a little different, this might be a good book to try. It's got lots of code to read, lots of bugs to understand, and lots of tools and techniques on display. Among all of this, I'm confident that you will find much to learn from, and you'll finish the book resolving, as I did, to practice these skills and improve your programming ability.