After reading about shellcode in Chapter 5 of Hacking: The Art of Exploitation, I wanted to go back through some of the examples and try them out. The first example was a simple Hello World program in Intel assembly. I followed along in the book and had no problems reproducing results on a 32 bit Linux VM using nasm with elf file format and ld for linking.

Then I decided I wanted to try something similar but with a little bit of a challenge: write a Mac OS X 64 bit “hello world” program using the new fast ‘syscall’ instruction instead of the software interrupt based (int 0×80) system call, this is where things got interesting.
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