I admit it, I’m a nerd. I sometimes construct filk lyrics.

Pf The Packet Filter

To the tune of Puff, the Magic Dragon.

Chorus:
Pf The Packet Filter lived ‘side Layer 3
And guarded all the network stack
In a land called B S D!

The sysadmins all loved him, that firewall called pf,
And bid him watch and N A T
And other fancy stuff.

[chorus]

The system had been hardened, in every different way,
PaX and N X Stack watched over EIP.
Raging worms and DoSes never did any harm,
and even the most skilled crackers would simply just give up! Oh,

[chorus]

Code can be proven, mathematically pure;
E C C and other things can only go so far.
One mid day it happened, the cooling system blew,
and pf, that mighty guardian, hit a machine check.
The fault handler panic()’d, the system simply stopped.
Pf no longer got a chance to get an interrupt!
The sysadmins saw “db>” and pondered what to do
They typed “reboot”, heard a beep, and then saw nothing more. Oh,

[chorus]

NOP Ride

To the tune of Sleigh Ride.

Just watch those buf-fers fill-a-ling
And, OOPS!, over-flow-a-ling too!
Such a lovely setup
For a NOP sled sneaking by you…
O’er net, the shell code’s coming,
And sploits are calling your code;
Such a lovely setup
For a NOP sled up to the payload!

Fetch decode, fetch decode, fetch decode, let’s go!
We’ve found the payload…
We’re running some injected elite shell code!
Fetch decode, fetch decode, fetch decode, it’s fine!
Just pay us no mind!
We’ll spawn a thread,
And be out of here in no time…

Your heap is big and full
And so curious are we…
We scan your allocations
Like you would never have let us see…
We’ll take that FILE before us
and snoop a socket() or two…
What a lovely setup
For a NOP sled together with you!