

Running out of hex words? - rschildmeijer
http://nedbatchelder.com/text/hexwords.html
deadbeaf and cafebabe is so 2010
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jrockway
I think malloc implementations that zero memory should be required to switch
to 0xa110ca7ed0 instead. Imagine a debugging session where you wonder, "is
this memory allocated?" and then you type "x 5" and you get "a1 10 ca 7e d0".
"Yes," you will be able to reply to yourself, "it is allocated."

~~~
mahmud
Isn't that, like, the oldest debugging trick in the world? First thing you do
to trace dataflow in an application is feed it known junk and search for that
in memory.

I loved "XXXXXXXXXX" when I was a cracker; lights the hex-view on fire with my
lucky 888888888888888s, and you could pick it out if it was disassembled as
code by mistake, since it's a series of "POP AX"s :-)

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douglasfshearer
The following paper may be of interest, it takes this idea considerably
further:

"Specifically, we demonstrate a technique for automatically producing English
Shellcode, transforming arbitrary shell- code into a representation that is
superficially similar to English prose."

<http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~sam/ccs243-mason.pdf>

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zaphoyd
IPv6 will provide another market for readable hex words

host www.v6.facebook.com www.v6.facebook.com has IPv6 address
2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

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forgotusername
Another simple approach seen in many places (e.g. Nucleus OS) is using ASCII
characters. That way, you get a unique identifier and as you get quicker at
recognising them, you also get to immediately ASCII character values in hex,
which is great for e.g. looking at coredumps..

    
    
        >>> 'SEMA'.encode('hex')
        '53454d41'

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ComputerGuru
Very incomplete list. His algorithm skips multiple permutations of the same
word.

Doesn't even have popular ones like d34d, c4f3, b33f, and _believe it or not_
1337!

~~~
iclelland
Um, that's mostly because there's no real need to substitute 'a' with '4',
because 'a' is a valid hex digit. Same goes for 'e' and '3'.

If you look, 'dead', 'cafe', 'beef', and even '1ee7' _are_ in the list.

~~~
ComputerGuru
Um, I know. That's actually what I said - there is no support for multiple
permutations.

If you're geeky enough to be using hexadecimal seed values that look like
words, you'll appreciate 0xD34DBEEF more than you will 0xdeadbeef. Or maybe
you won't. But it's still a valid option, and IMHO, his algorithm shouldn't
have ignored them.

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rschildmeijer
5ca1ab1e, ca11ab1e. to mention a few

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labria
d34dc0de is my favourite one, not on this list =(

~~~
quanticle
Well, he did say that his list only includes single words, not truncations
(e.g. 'decaf') or compound words (e.g. 'deadbeef', 'deadc0de', etc.).

