A Basic Guide to Bug Hunting with Ghidra

Discover the art of uncovering vulnerabilities without the aid of source code or commercial tooling. This class is a deep-dive on how to use open source tools to shed light on closed source binaries. We will cover how bug hunters use free tools like Ghidra, AFL, QEMU, Frida, and GDB, to find exploitable bugs in modern software. Students will be introduced to each of these tools and more as we walk through exercises demonstrating their use. We will start with relatively simple techniques, like using Ghidra to identify and trace potentially insecure function calls, but by the end we will be looking at advanced techniques for stitching fuzzers together from compiled code. We'll also explore opportunities for using dynamic analysis to identify interesting code paths and reveal subtle bugs. Students in this class should be comfortable working with C code and have a basic understanding of memory safety vulnerabilities.