Asukiko

Young people just getting into vulnerability research and exploit development today days have it soooo much harder than those who started even as little as 10 years ago. Binary exploitation is at least an order of magnitude more difficult today than in 2015. Especially if you have zero experiencing doing it. For those who are experienced, the difficulty levels have risen *somewhat* gradually. Though many still haven't been able to keep up. And even among those who could keep up, there are many who have just found it to be so hard as to no longer be fun, and have moved on to other things. Some have posited that binary exploitation has become so hard that the future will be logical/functionality abuse. And while this category of bugs certainly shows a quite a bit of promise in second order exploitation components like LPE, TCC bypass, etc—memory corruption still reigns supreme when it comes to initial access. Memory corruption that is actually exploitable in a reliable, near-instant and deterministic manner—versus random non-useful null ptr dereferences in browsers that require spraying whatevers to get 60% reliability—has gotten so incredibly tough (at least in the most contested systems) that there may be as few as 400 or 500 people in the world today that can actually pull it off repeatably. Seriously, it's probably 400 or 500 people (just my best guess) And that's *with* the help of AI, custom/expensive/gov-only tooling, insider insights/experience and any other resources imaginable. So if you don't make it into the elite of binary exploitation, don't beat yourself up. It's a group of people roughly as rare as NBA players. However, unlike the NBA, it's not obvious who is 7 feet tall with a 40 inch vertical, and who isn't. So it doesn't hurt to try—as long as you're having fun.