Cybersecurity Mentors Podcast · Cybersecurity Mentors

A Day in the Life of a Penetration Tester with Carson Sallis

·47 min·2 clips

Carson uses AFL, clang, and AddressSanitizer to expose a stack buffer overflow in a tiny C program.

1. Cybersecurity Mentors Podcast focuses on Carson Salas and offensive security engineering. 2. Carson Salas is the returning guest, and Steve introduces him as an offensive security engineer at NVIDIA. 3. The episode asks what a day looks like for Carson and why vulnerability research matters. 4. Carson says offensive security engineer is an umbrella title that can include red teaming and pen testing. 5. He describes his own work as vulnerability research and bug hunting, not only bug bounty-style web testing. 6. Carson distinguishes bug bounty hunting from the source-code-focused work he does on zero-day-style bugs. 7. He says his job is usually finding bugs in source code that he has access to. 8. Carson says his pen-testing background gave him the foundation for vulnerability research. 9. He names fuzzing, programming, and source code review as core prerequisites. 10. Carson explains fuzzing as continuously transforming input by changing size and bytes. 11. He says fuzzing looks for edge cases that developers did not account for. 12. Carson ties fuzzing to crashes, malformed behavior, and later exploitation potential. 13. He says fuzzing can even uncover SQL injection by sending malformed SQL-related input. 14. Carson describes using tools like grep and Waggly for manual and automated C code review. 15. He says Waggly is like a supercharged grep that uses regular expressions to surface potentially vulnerable lines. 16. In the demo, Carson compiles a vulnerable C program with AFL’s clang and AddressSanitizer. 17. He seeds the fuzzer with a text file containing “hello” and watches AFL generate crashes. 18. AddressSanitizer points to a stack buffer overflow caused by `strcpy` without a bounds check. 19. The conversation stays instructional and hands-on, with Carson narrating each step of the demo. 20. People learning offensive security, fuzzing, or C code review would get the most from this episode.

As heard by us

A practical walkthrough of how AFL and compiler choice shape the start of vulnerability hunting.

The episode frames Carson Salas's offensive security work at NVIDIA as a practical walkthrough of fuzzing rather than a broad survey. He starts with AFL, shows why compiling C with the fuzzer's own clang compiler can expose more of a program's behavior, and builds from a small…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want Carson at your shoulder, walking from C code to a fuzzing run with the terminal doing the teaching.

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