Pwn Recon — checksec + Cyclic Offset
First moves against a pwn target: read the binary''s mitigations (NX/PIE/RELRO/canary), then pin the overflow offset with a De Bruijn pattern.
# which mitigations are in play?
checksec --file=./<binary>
# find the exact offset to the saved return address
pwn cyclic 200 # generate a pattern, feed it to the crashing input
pwn cyclic -l 0x<value> # look up the offset from the value that landed in RIP/EIP