C++ Memory Corruption - part 1
Dr Silvio Cesare @silviocesare Summary C++ is a popular systems programming language. As such, it is desirable to develop exploitation primitives for this language since many exploitation targets will be written in C++. This blog posts looks at 2 C++ specific exploitation techniques when STL objects are subject to memory corruption. In particular, we will examine vector iterators and smart pointers in Linux on Ubuntu 20.04. Introduction Generic or abstract data types are implemented in C++ using a library known as STL or the standard template library. Typical STL containers include abstract data types such as linked lists, vectors, arrays, associative maps, sets, and hash tables. As part of STL, iterator classes exist to navigate through their appropriate data structure. Different types of iterators exist for particular STL objects. For example, a singly linked list implemented as the STL forward_list, only allows iteration in a single direction. Thus a forward iterator is mor