The course also gives an overview of practical protection methods that can be applied at different levels (hardware components, the operating system, programming languages, the compiler, the source code or in production) to prevent the occurrence of the various bugs, to detect them during development and before market launch, or to prevent their exploitation during system operation. Through exercises specially tailored to these mitigation techniques participants can learn how simple – and moreover cheap – it is to get rid of various security problems.

• Common security vulnerabilities
  Buffer Overflow (BOF), stack and heap overflow; array indexing problems, the unicode bug; missing or improper input validation, integer problems, widthness bug, signedness bug, arithmetic overflow, Printf format string bug (PFS), Directory Traversal Vulnerability (DTV); improper use of security features, weak randomness, password management; error handling-related problems; race conditions, Time-of-Checking-to-Time-of-Usage (TOCTTOU) vulnerability, safe signal handling, and many more…
• Mitigation techniques:
  Never eXecute (NX bit) access mode of Virtual Memory Management (VMM); Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) – PaX, ExecShield; Stack smashing protection (SSP), StackGuard, ProPolice…
• Exercises:
  Sexploiting stack overflow – executing shell codes; applying protection techniques (stack smashing protection, non-executable stack and heap, ASLR); circumventing protections with NOP sleding, Return-to-libc attack, Return Oriented Programming (ROP); understanding integer problems; applying mitigation techniques; crafting a printf format attack string – write-what-where (WWW) possibilities; password management; problems of exception-based error handling; exploiting race conditions; and many spot- and-correct-the-bug exercises.