Setting up Environment for Buffer Overflow Learning

Question

I am currently reading several security books(my passion) regarding secure programming, however either the distro's they provide on disc are faulty, or non-existent. Books:Hacking The art of Exploitation 2nEd, Grey Hat hacking 2nEd The issue is that when i try to follow the examples, obviously newer distros have stack protection and other security features implemented to prevent these situations, and I have tried to manually setup the environment provided with Hacking the art of exploitation, but I have failed. Also I have tried DVL(Dam Vulnerable Linux) but its way too bloated, I just want a minimal environment that I can have in a small partition and choose from bootloader OR have in a small virtualbox.

So my question is this: How do I go about setting up an environment(distro old kernel) that I can follow most of these examples in. Possibly if someone could tell me the kernel and GCC version of DVL I could get most of it setup myself.

Answer 1

If you still have DVL available, you can use the commands:

$ uname -r
$ gcc --version

to find out for yourself.

Edit: according to distrowatch.com the linux kernel is 2.6.20 and gcc is 3.4.6

Answer 2

You need to rebuild the kernel without stack and heap protections including non-executable stack. You then need to compile using gcc flags to turn off the protections, one of which would be "-fno-stack-protector". Also because you will run into it soon enough you probably want to statically compile your program because it will be a bit easier to understand it when you are debugging into your 0x41414141 payload.

Also depending on your definition of "bloat" it might be easiest to just download an older distro of linux, redhat 5 or an old slackware and install and use that with the default toolchain.