Posts

I was bored this weekend and decided to take some rust out of my reversing skills before they disappear for good. I have spent the past two years or so mostly writing C code (secure C is more like an asymptote but that is why it is a fun challenge) and barely doing any serious reverse engineering and security research. So I decided to revisit some unfinished business with qwertyoruiop’s crackme. I had a look when he originally sent it but got distracted with something else at the time and never finished it. I couldn’t find any public write-up about it so I decided to write one. It is mostly targeted to newcomers to reverse engineering and macOS. You can click the pictures to see the full size version. ...

Many years ago I had to use gdb for the first time and I absolutely hated it. At the time I was reversing (cof cof cof) Windows apps so SoftIce and friends were my favorite tools. Compared to these gdb was a complete trash, mostly because the naked gdb lacks a nice context display. I like to know what the hell is going around each time I step in the debugger, without having to type a bunch of commands for it. Then I discovered the original gdbinit by +mammon and life with gdb was a bit easier. ...

Happy New Year and happy ten year anniversary to this blog, which I totally forgot back in October :-/. Blogging activity here has been so slow that I almost forgot how to work with Hugo. We started 2018 with heavy speculation on critical CPU bugs that were under disclosure embargo. Luckily for us, Google decided to break the embargo and release some proper information about the bugs so speculation could stop and facts could finally flow in. The merits or not of disclosure embargos deserve a serious discussion but this post is not the place for it. This one was for sure a huge mess. The world was finally introduced to Meltdown and Spectre. ...

This is a guest post by a young and talented Portuguese exploiter, Federico Bento. He won this year’s Pwnie for Epic Achievement exploiting TIOCSTI ioctl. Days ago he posted a video demonstrating an exploit for CVE-2017-5123 and luckly for you I managed to convince him to do a write-up about it. I hope you enjoy his work. Thanks Federico! ...

American fuzzy lop aka AFL is one of the easiest and best fuzzers out there and should be part of your development cycle if you care at least one bit about the security of your code. Its performance in OS X is a bit of a let down because of issues at fork() system call. AFL warns you about this when compiling it: WARNING: Fuzzing on MacOS X is slow because of the unusually high overhead of fork() on this OS. Consider using Linux or *BSD. You can also use VirtualBox (virtualbox.org) to put AFL inside a Linux or *BSD VM. ...