3 ms·
Exploit codes are often the most beautiful code I read, they are usually small and take some dazzling brilliance to push the computer and make it do what it was
by segmondy 7y ago
Exploit codes are often the most beautiful code I read, they are usually small and take some dazzling brilliance to push the computer and make it do what it wasn't.
I can remember the first code that showed how to exploit IFS, race conditions via symlink, the classic "smashing the stack", RTM's worm.
Beauty of a code to me has nothing to do with the formatting, comments, documentations, but everything to do with the mind that bent it into place. Most of the beautiful code I have ever seen would be classified as ugly, spaghetti, not production worthy.
- alasdair_ 7y ago>RTM's worm I had absolutely no idea until now that RTM co-founded y-combinator. I remember him from mentioned in Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown and Clifford Stoll's The Cookoo's Egg as well as an occasional Phrack article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris
- the_watcher 7y agoHe was one of PG's Viaweb cofounders as well. He also introduced PG to the third cofounder, Trevor Blackwell.
- exikyut 7y agoI have similar admiration of hardware hacks. My current favorite is the one that dumped the SecureROM out of the iPhone 6 via PCI-e: http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmedma http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmedma, http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie http://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie I'm partly impressed by the tooling used; most of the coolness (to me) is the author's self-confidence in his hunch that the SoC _didn't_ have its MMU set up properly, and the way he followed his nose in determining that he was probably right. I still wonder exactly how much was sunk into the project, before it was possible to determine that the MMU was indeed broken. Heh.