codeblog code is freedom — patching my itch

January 17, 2006

ngsec games

Filed under: Reverse Engineering,Security — kees @ 5:49 pm

Today I was reminded of the NGsec security games site from a DefCon CTF team-mate. (This game was actually used as a prequal for DefCon 10, which I didn’t go to. Ken told me stories about it, though.) I burned through stages 1-9 in about 45 minutes, and then hit stage 10 and was side-tracked learning about encrypted ELF binaries.

There continues to be no useful FOSS binary analyzers for this kind of reverse engineering. gdb just doesn’t even begin to cut it: it was made for (surprise!) debugging programs built by friendly compilers, not doing forensics on decidedly unfriendly, hand-crafted binaries . If Paul Graham and Richard Hamming are to be believed:

  1. What are the most important problems in your field?
  2. Are you working on one of them?
  3. Why not?

I should be writing a static binary analyzer. And a dynamic one too. GPL IDApro replacement. Yeow.

© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
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1 Comment

  1. […] Here’s an idea ganked totally out of context from my good buddy Kees’ codeblog: […]

    Pingback by The Latest Obsession » Blog Archive » Check yo’self — January 17, 2006 @ 7:41 pm

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