ABE – Applied Binary Exploitation
To take part in the exercises, please register at https://abe.seclab-bonn.de/register/ between 2026-04-14 and 2026-04-17.
You will need a secret value to register. This secret value will be revealed in the first lecture on 2026-04-14.
Contact
For all questions, remarks and complaints, or if you missed the first lecture but still want to participate, please contact placeholder@example.com.
Administrative notes
This is the website for the module MA-INF 3322 Applied Binary Exploitation (Uni Bonn) / M(CSP|I|VG)-[1-3]-WP[CFS]-[1-4] Applied Binary Exploitation (HBRS).
This time the lecture will be online only. The lectures will be recorded. Exercise meetings will not be recorded.
This course is offered at the University of Bonn and at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg. There will be no eCampus course and no LEA course. All lecture materials will be made available on this website instead.
Time and Location
The lectures take place on Tuesday 10-12 CEST. The first lecture takes place on Tuesday, 2026-04-14.
Tutorials take place on Wednesday 14-16 CEST. The first tutorial takes place on Wednesday, 2026-04-22.
Note that tutorials only take place every other week (see schedule below).
Online participation for lectures and exercises is possible via BBB. You do not need to login / create an account in order to join.
Schedule
This preliminary schedule is of course subject to change.
| Nr | Date | Lecture Topics |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 2026-04-14 | Welcome! Administrative Remarks, Demo |
| 1 | 2026-04-21 | Vulnerability Research / Bug Hunting |
| 2026-04-22 | Sheet 0 Tutorial, Sheet 1 released | |
| 2 | 2026-04-28 | Stack-based Buffer Overflows: Calling Conventions, ret2libc |
| 3 | 2026-05-05 | Stack-based Buffer Overflows: Shellcode |
| 2026-05-06 | Sheet 1 Tutorial, Sheet 2 released | |
| 4 | 2026-05-12 | Code Reuse Attacks: ROP |
| 5 | 2026-05-19 | Code Reuse Attacks: Advanced Techniques |
| 2026-05-20 | ||
| 2026-05-26 | - No Lecture - (Pentecost Break) | |
| 6 | 2026-06-02 | Format Strings Exploits / glibc ptmalloc Internals |
| 2026-06-03 | Sheet 2 Tutorial | |
| 7 | 2026-06-09 | Heap glibc: Use-After-Free |
| 2026-06-10 | Sheet 3 Tutorial, Sheet 4 released | |
| 8 | 2026-06-16 | Heap glibc: Unlink Exploit |
| 9 | 2026-06-23 | Heap glibc: House of Orange Pt. 1 |
| 2026-06-24 | Sheet 4 Tutorial, Sheet 5 released | |
| 10 | 2026-06-30 | Heap glibc: House of Orange Pt. 2 |
| 11 | 2026-07-07 | Real World Case Study: Exim RCE Exploit Pt. 1 |
| 2026-07-08 | Sheet 5 Tutorial | |
| 12 | 2026-07-14 | Real World Case Study: Exim RCE Exploit Pt. 2 |
| 13 | 2026-07-21 | Invited Talk (TBA) |
Please note that the dates may differ from BASIS and Co. Only the dates on this site are final.
Description
Our computers run a lot of closed source binary programs meaning that the source code of those programs is not available. Naturally, those programs contain bugs, mistakes that the programmer made during the development. Those bugs could (under certain circumstances) be exploited by attackers and thus may lead to arbitrary code execution. In this lecture we aim to teach you how to find well known exploitable bugs and how to exploit them. After a brief recap of basic binary program analysis such as static and dynamic analysis, we will talk about vulnerability discovery in general, meaning that you will learn how to find exploitable bugs by yourself. Next we move on to basic stack-based buffer overflows and add mitigation techniques (stack cookies, NX, ASLR, RELRO, …) as we progress and exploit them as well. After we finished the topic of stack-based buffer overflows we move on to more advanced topics such as heap exploitation, use-after-free exploits and others. The lecture ends with an analysis of a sophisticated real-world exploit.
At the last lecture date, there will be a guest lecture from a renowned expert. Past guest lecturers were:
2025: Dominik Czarnota (@disconnect3d): Escaping the matrix: exploiting custom QEMU cpu bugs from a HXP CTF 2024 task with Pwndbg
2024: Cedric Halbronn (@saidelike): Evolution of exploit development over the last 15 years
2023: Robert Xiao (@nneonneo): Exploiting a Filesystem Driver in a Kernel CTF Challenge
2021: Claudio Guarnieri (@botherder): A talk about journalists, human rights defenders and dissidents that face increasingly sophisticated digital threats and what to do about it.
2020: Maddie Stone (@maddiestone): Reversing the Root: Identifying the Exploited Vulnerability in 0-days Used In-The-Wild
2019: Gynvael Coldwind (@gynvael): Notes on Computer Hardware and Security
2018: Thomas Dullien (@halvarflake): Fundamentals of Security Exploits