The Rise and Fall of Binary Exploitation

No ratings

Presented at DEFCON 23 by

For the past 20+ years binary exploitation has been seen as the ultimate challenge and prize, when exploiting large applications and operating systems. During this period, the question of "How much longer will we be able to do this?" has been asked countless times, and with good reason. Memory safety and corruption issues with low-level languages have been an enormous challenge for OS and application developers. There are certainly efforts to move to "safer" languages such as Rust, but those languages need to mature a bit longer before they're able to stand up to the capabilities of a language like C++.