The black hats have kept up with security enhancements. Have you? In the technological arena, three years is a lifetime. Since the first edition of this book was published in 2004, built-in security measures on compilers and operating systems have become commonplace, but are still far from perfect. Arbitrary-code execution vulnerabilities still allow attackers to run code of their choice on your system—with disastrous results. In a nutshell, this book is about code and data and what happens when the two become confused. You'll work with the basic building blocks of security bugs—assembler, source code, the stack, the heap, and so on. You'll experiment, explore, and understand the systems you're running—and how to better protect them.