Hacking: learning by breaking stuff

• Post lunch, I started pairing with Stephanie on the exercises in the Hacking book, and that turned out to be super fun!
• We got through the chapter on exploitation, which focussed on stack overflows, heap overflows, overflows in function pointers, and string formatting exploits. It acted as more than a gentle refresher for C, and was super fun!
• Running the examples on a 64bit system, added an additional amount of thinking required, and was good, IMO.
• I hadn’t worked along with Stephanie on the material in the first two chapters. So, I went back home and tried to catch up, but couldn’t get all of it done.

Miscellaneous

• I spent part of the morning wrapping up the install script for the raspberry project, and cleaning up the repository. It looks reasonable now, and I think I’m done with it until the end of HackerSchool.
• I also tried to look for “easy” python issues that would involve me writing some C code, but didn’t really find anything other than documentation… I guess, I should pick a module and look for bugs in it, instead.
• Also, while chatting with a friend, I had to explain that I don’t mention the last names of people or link to them, for privacy reasons. Hacker School is particularly careful about not divulging information about who are at Hacker School each batch, and I want to keep that tradition.