Designing BSD Rootkits

Chapter 8. CLOSING WORDS

The word rootkit tends to have a negative connotation, but rootkits are just systems programs. The techniques outlined in this book can be—and have been—used for both "good" and "evil." Regardless, I hope this book has inspired you to do some kernel hacking of your own, whether it be writing a rootkit, writing a device driver, or just parsing through the kernel source.

Before wrapping up, three additional points are worth mentioning. First, unless you are writing a rootkit for educational purposes, you should try to keep it as simple as possible; being fancy, only introduces errors. Second, like writing any piece of kernel code, be mindful of concurrency issues (both uniprocessor and SMP), race conditions, and how you transition ...