Book Review: A Guide to Kernel Exploitation

Chapter 1

Perla and Oldani lay out some of the verbage/terminology that frames the rest of the book, explaining what a kernel is at a high-level and what it might mean to exploit it. There’s a number of terms they go out of their way to speak to:

• They discuss the function of so-called “super users” (standing in for Administrator accounts in Windows OS and root for Linux) and how they’re uniquely positioned to enact changes to the kernel.
• They highlight memory-related exploits, speaking to things like shellcode injection

They denote that the kernel is a useful vehicle for enacting protections for user-land code (e.g. DEP, ASLR, etc.).