Fuzzing for Crashes

Fuzzing is sending malformed or oversized input to a program to trigger unexpected behavior, especially crashes. A crash often signals a memory corruption bug.

For buffer overflows, the first goal is to make the target crash so we know an overflow exists.

The classic exploitation workflow is:

• Fuzz to crash the program.
• Find the exact offset to the return address.
• Control EIP.
• Redirect to shellcode.

This lesson covers the first two steps.