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Comment by 0x70run | Hacker News Reader

A bit OT - how do I work on developing the skill set necessary to find vulnerabilities like these? Should I take some particular courses, or some other “track” of sorts? At the moment, I have an undergraduate in Computer Sciences, and I’d say I’m a fairly OK programmer.

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Check out LiveOverflow on YT. Maybe play some CTFs, but don't do that super seriously, just enough to get you hooked on binary exploitation. They're fun, especially if you find some teammates to cooperate with.

And then just, well, practice. A lot of practice. Mostly driven by curiosity about how things work - bugs will then just start to pop up and you are free to investigate whatever piques your interest. The more likely you are to just open up a debugger when a piece of software annoys you and try to binary patch it, the closer you are to being a security researcher :).

There's not much books/courses on this, low-level hacking is something that you kind of just learn as you go. But, for instance, if you never touched gdb/lldb, or never looked at assembly code, or never wrote C - you should investigate that first as base skills.

As for books, The Art of Software Security Assessment is frequently recommended, including by members of Project Zero.

There is an excellent pre-packaged VM with levels of challenges that take you through the basics of exploitation to quite advanced levels called "Modern Binary Exploitation" [0]. I would highly recommend it.

You can also do the challenges using IDA/Ghidra instead of looking at the source for a proper challenge and I recommend doing this initially for each challenge.

[0] https://github.com/RPISEC/MBE

I'd recommend CTF'ing a bit stronger than the other commenter. While there can be a distinct gap between the vulnerabilities in ctfs and real world applications, CTFs provide a great means of deliberate practice (work on a problem, potentially figure it out, and then read other peoples' write-ups after the competition ends).

Checkout https://ctftime.org/ for a list of ctfs. There are also intro ctfs like https://picoctf.org/

I didn't meant to discourage from playing CTFs, I just became jaded by seeing the same kind of heap feng shui tasks over and over and over again :). You know, the note-management linked list task with a simple CLI menu. Not to mention the proliferation of 0/1day tasks, which are IMO just lazy.

Do play CTFs. Just pick the fun challenges. pwnable.kr used to have some good stuff if you want to level up.

I think we're on the same page. Once someone gets good enough at heap shenanigans, they likely have a good enough skill baseline to go after real targets. In terms of skill development though, I found ctf'ing gave me a decent sense of what may be exploitable, that it would be hard to get otherwise.

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