Core Tenets

This site is designed around a series of ideas that we think will make your experience as a learner as positive as possible.

1. No initial expectation of knowledge
2. Everyone moves at their own pace
3. Understanding foundational theory comes before building technical skills
4. Developing fundamental technical skills lays the groundwork for success in any topic
5. Knowledge must be actionable
6. The measure of a community is how they treat those who are trying to gain entry
7. There is no such thing as being done learning

Anytime something on this site doesn't seem to be matching up with our core tenets, let me know so I can fix it. We made as many possible mechanisms for you to help us improve our approach, the content, and the community of this site as possible. This site is a living entity and changes on a regular basis so that we can improve your experience.

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So What is ROP?

All you need to know right now is that ROP is an advanced exploitation technique which beats advanced defenses by chaining together the code which was already in a program. That definition is good enough for now, the critical bit to understand is that you take snippets of existing code, chain it back together in a new order, and then use those to jump to where you need to go next. As you go through this course you will do the same thing, gathering and rearranging information and skills you've already learned to jump to new locations.

Nothing in this course is spoonfed, and while we try to give you good resources, there are multiple parts in the course where we tell you to go find out how to do something with Google. We do this when we know there are plenty of high quality resources out there for you to learn from and we want you to become comfortable accomplishing difficult tasks with no direction other than a couple searchterms.

Content

This curriculum was created based on inputs from members of my old team and various guides scattered throughout the internet on how to break into information security. I put this curriculum together by aggregating all of the guides and tutorials I could find, identified what I thought was important and added my own commentary. To say that this is built on the backs of a hundred other people's work would be an understatement, and I am forever grateful to be part of a community which has created so many amazing resources. All attempts to cite source material have been made, if there is anything I have not properly attributed, let me know. Despite having been in the works for the last four years, this is only the second iteration of the curriculum and it changes drastically as I see what does and doesn't work. The only way I learn the difference is feedback from viewers like you, so critique away.