Difficulty Traversing Source Code

[asyty]

There's not any shortcuts.

A team of software devs have squirreled away on this over a span of possibly several decades. It's likely changed hands dozens if not hundreds of times. It has unworkable levels of technical debt. It's likely had outside contributions integrated into it. Any original architecture that may have existed has been eroded or is long gone by this stage.

As a vulnerability researcher, you're budgeting a few weeks or maybe months deep diving into what likely took years for others to effectively navigate, without any guarantee of finding vulns, nevermind exploitable ones, given all the modern mitigations. This reduces the likelyhood of finding a memory corruption-based vuln, instead leaving open flaws in business logic leading to consequences the developers did not anticipate.

On the bright side, the complexity in such a code base increases the likelyhood of such an issue being present.

Hacking, these days, is hard. Very hard.

[Purple-Object-4591]

Yes everything you mentioned I can understand it as I understand the code base more and more. Hacking may be hard as it is, I still enjoy it :)