The document discusses return-oriented programming (ROP), an advanced exploitation technique used to leverage buffer overflow vulnerabilities by chaining short instruction sequences known as 'gadgets' to perform arbitrary computations. It provides a historical background of ROP, examples of its uses in computer worms, and various countermeasures to mitigate such vulnerabilities. Additionally, it includes a demonstration of a ROP compiler, ropgadget, which helps identify available gadgets within a binary.