Hardened C & C++: A Practitioner's Guide to Low-Level Security, Memory Safety, and Exploit Mitigation

By Jason Gran

The era of "pointer and pray" is over.
For fifty years, C and C++ have powered the world's critical infrastructure. They give you raw power, but they demand perfection. A single off-by-one error, a stray pointer, or a race condition can lead to catastrophic system compromise. In an age of ransomware and state-sponsored cyberwarfare, the cost of manual memory management has become too high.
You don't have to switch to Rust to write secure code. You just need to stop writing legacy C++.
Hardened C & C++ is a field manual for the modern systems programmer. It rejects the academic approach of "theoretical security" in favor of an engineering-first mindset. It teaches you how to weaponize the compiler, automate the detection of bugs, and architect software that is hostile to exploitation by design.
Written for embedded developers, game engine architects, and security researchers, this book bridges the gap between the breaker (exploit analysis) and the builder (defensive engineering).
Inside, you will master:
The Anatomy of Failure: Deep dives into the stack frame, heap metadata, and exactly how buffer overflows and Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerabilities grant attackers control of the instruction pointer.
Modern Defense Mechanisms: How to eradicate entire classes of bugs using RAII, Smart Pointers (std:: unique_ptr), std:: span, and strong typing (C++20/23).
The Sanitizer Ecosystem: Integrating AddressSanitizer (ASan), UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (UBSan), and ThreadSanitizer (TSan) into your CI/CD pipeline to catch bugs before they commit.
Automated Fuzzing: How to write LibFuzzer targets that bombard your internal APIs with millions of test cases per minute to discover edge cases no human could predict.
Compiler Hardening: A comprehensive guide to flags like -fstack-protector-strong, _FORTIFY_SOURCE, and Control Flow Integrity (CFI) that add invisible armor to your binary.
Stop relying on code reviews to catch invisible memory corruption. Start building systems that are mathematically proven to be robust.
Master the art of low-level defense today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0G5GJWWQH
• ISBN13: 9798277679906
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 7.0" x 10.0"