A flink to the past : introduction

What we will explain here is how to obtain a basic 4 bytes write primitive through a heap overflow in… Windows XP SP1.

To do so, I’ll follow this mr_me tutorial, which explains how to abuse the way the heap unlinks memory chunks before XP SP2, and try to expand on anything that I had a hard time grasping.

Keep in mind that my knowledge on heap management was non-existent before starting to write this, so if you see anything that doesn’t seem right, do not hesitate to leave a comment.