in the name of zero

next week, i’ll start drinking coffee so i can be more productive at night. yesterday was day two since i started learning php and css. i find it cool that i’m beginning to like doing things that work in the web. i’ve always tried to avoid learning languages that are mainly used in web production because back then, i honestly thought that this is just something any person can easily become an expert in. obviously, that wasn’t a very nice thought, since i’m passing judgement based on what i percieve and i have no quantifying experience about any programming language to give brands in the first place. an outpour of bitterness on my part there, but this isn’t a rant so i’ll stop.

i take it that by now, you realize that the series of posts i’ll be posting from now on is something like a progress report. day two of my css and php learning can be called object oriented day. i began exploring classes and inheritance in both css and php and i loved it.

change of plans, we’ll be ditching foxpro in favor of php/mysql to make the e-voting system of our school.

learning how to use cascading style sheets like a true zen master is difficult. but i’ve made some progress into doing some things in css, things i never did before. i never did get interested in doing any web developing as far as i can remember. but i’m doing it now as if my life is counting on it. trying to squeeze every bit of brain power i can afford just to do accelerated learning in php (a hypertext preprocessor, gimp (gnu image manipuation program), and css (cascading stylsheets) i’ve gained some confidence with my photo-processing skills in gimp, but there are still many more techniques to learn. i’m doing something different than what i normally do. and if you ask me, i feel like i’m beginning to stray far from the usual.

god. give me the strength to become a very good web programmer. clear my mind so that i can absorb the stuffs that i force myself to read, understand and masterin such a short time. i believe in myself.

inspire me, so i can finish my work.

the rundown basicly consists of the following:
1) make a shared library
2) make a program that calls it
3) inspect the shared object, like what happened before.
4) inspect the main program, like what happened before.
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every once in a while… i enter into a despression-laden slump that i find absolutely hard to shake off. sadness is the very reason why i like to do stuffs, but sometimes … it’s also the reason for the very opposite of that feeling of inspiration.

running stressed and depressed for two days, i finally hit my peak last friday when i got sick. only a slight fever but then my body was aching all over so most of the time, i was just in bed trying to sleep things away (to no avail) coz first, i was feeling hot and cold at the same time. two, my back, joints.. everything ached. and three, i somehow get dizzy easily whenever i try to stand.

so last night, miss steph called to inquire some things about the automated voting system that my cs group proposed last sem. wow. her mere call worked faster than any medicine i took. so much for paracetamol. so i guess i’ll be taking a long break from linux and the random things i do in it now. perhaps erase gentoo also to make way for microsoft windows and visual foxpro. with gentoo around, i’ll really get distracted and i don’t want that to happen. continuing the automated voting system for her is more important and satisfying than any other work i’ve ever accomplished.

no regrets,
- niel

the injection opcode isn’t really elegant or anything, but i found other articles quite difficult to follow at first because of the advanced styles they are using. the ones i’ve seen involved forking, or ‘call instruction mimicry’, or ‘original register restoration’ or a combination of all of them. i start again, with the simple ‘hello world’. no shell-spawning or stuff like that.

the rundown basically consists of :
1) attaching to a process and read its registers (esp and eip)
2) allocate space in the stack segment for the shellcode
3) point eip to the start of the allocated space
4) give control back to the program. (in most cases, but not here. i simply exit())

first comes the test program i wanna trace. it’s just an infinite for loop that prints some text on the screen. my goal is to insert instructions that will make it print another string and quit.
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.. on the third day, he rose again.

once again, we are reminded of our own sinfulness, with the glorious story of a lowly carpenter.

john 13:31-33

’til easter sunday my friends.

in part 1 of this post, i took a look at an elf binary’s global offset table - procedure linkage table under gdb i learned their basic components and structure. although, i have yet to see them in action. i’ll start by showing the initial values of the global offset table again (program still hasn’t been executed)
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yeah baby! like all the cool kids out there, i got myself a del.icio.us account just minutes ago. and an account at putfwd dot com where i can save some files.

there are just some things i can’t afford to lose again. bookmarks, files and everything.

to do more cool stuffs with ptrace(), elf sorcery is in order. or so i think. i’ve done some basic experiments (1 ,2, 3) with the elf abi some time ago, but that couldn’t prepare me for the things i wish to do recently. so today, i’ll be continuing my elf adventures by learning how the got (global offset table) and plt (procedure linkage table) mechanisms work.

see:
“global offset table and procedure linkage table” - the elf specification

i made a simple program so i can follow this paper too.

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