I suspect the reason why most exploit code is so messy to read is that while writing the exploit you're still figuring out the "architecture and language" of the thing you are attacking.
There are so many false starts, and so many false assumptions when you start.
A simple false assumption can start you down a wrong path for weeks... but often you can't easily verify that it is false before starting.
@HalvarFlake Plus a lot of the time it's: calc popped, done! Next vuln, please. (Unless it's going into "production" and you have to clean it up and make it reliable)
Sometimes just by reading the exploit code you can clearly see the thought process the author went through at the time and the rabbit holes they went down etc (especially when code based on old/wrong assumptions is merely commented out not deleted) I often found that insight immensely helpful.
@HalvarFlake @kwanre in the past few years I decided to go back and re-write my exploits once they are "good enough" because I want them to be more clean/accurate/readable, not just for others, but for myself.
I'll never forget the emails from a leaked email spool around ~2002 when the US Army said one of jduck's exploits was "the cleanest we had ever seen". And it was. ;-)
@HalvarFlake @kwanre @saper did you read my recent blog post on the RISC-V MCM flaws?
A point I made in that piece is that exploit engineering (in the context of complex exploit dev) requires a thousand-foot view of an entire technology to succeed, while engineers are often cordoned off to specific subsets of technologies.
Complementary skills, but very different perspectives.
@donb @saper @kwanre @HalvarFlake I disagree that an exploit dev has to understand the whole technology. Finding vulns is basically: this thing takes input in this way and it probably goes to something that looks like a similar thing I've seen before so I'll try this kind of attack.
Then exploiting it is a deep dive, not broad learning. Recent example: I wrote the Struts OGNL injection module and I still don't know fuckall about what Struts does or how it works from an engineering perspective
@egypt @HalvarFlake @kwanre @saper yes in that context I fully agree with you. I've written a lot of Linux kernel bugs before I understood anything about the Linux kernel.
I'm talking here about systemic issues that are harder to find unless you understand the relationships between technologies and their security models.
HalvarFlake
Astarte
donb
Marcin Cieślak
egyp7