The next time you are in the mood for some interesting Friday hacking, I may have just the thing for you. (This will only be fun of course if you are in a fairly restricted environment, where doing this kind of thing would be considered a hack 😉 ).
You may be familiar with the CREATE DATA statement in ABAP, which allows you to create data in a program by specifying the name of the type at runtime. What you may not be familiar with, is the concept of absolute type names in ABAP.
Sometimes you stumble across things, which, though not mind blowing, could turn out to be useful one day, but for the time being you just have to file under “trivia”. I recently made two such discoveries.
Lately I have been musing (contemplating, meditating on) the term “IDE” or “Integrated Development Environment”. What is it that makes it integrated? Well, you have of course an editor, a compiler and a debugger (or any other combination of tools) integrated into one program. However, the program itself is still pretty much standalone. It is usually not integrated into anything else. So much for “integrated”. Tsk, tsk.
Firstly, let me just make this disclaimer that I don’t know what the difference between an exploit and a vulnerability is. I don’t know the proper definitions of each, either. I’m pretty sure what I’m about to reveal is not a security flaw though. However, using the information contained herein, a malicious user can wreak a fair bit of havoc on an ABAP system.
This month marks two anniversaries for me. One is the engagement to my wife 6 years ago. The other is that I have been working for 10 years. I started out in ABAP and I’ve been doing ABAP ever since (with long excursions into Java along the way). I have come to greatly respect ABAP, with which I have chiefly been earning my bread and butter.
There are some things about ABAP that don’t seem so great at first. It’s a proprietary language tied into a particular system, and it can’t be applied outside of that context. ABAP smacks of older mainframe languages, from which I’m sure it’s inherited some traits. The syntax and keywords seem odd and nonsensical, even clunky and quirky at times.
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