Defcon 25 in Review

This year I attended Defcon for the second time. I live in the UK, so making it out to the US for this awesome conference is something that I look forward to throughout the year. As part of my day job I'm a penetration tester, and I actually found myself in Santa Clara the week before Defcon on an assessment. Due to some unique circumstances, I took what I think must be a record breaking detour back to Defcon. After checking out the local famous garages and technology spots, I was on a flight b... Read More »

Exploiting with pwndbg - Solving PlaidCTF 2016 SmartStove

This bank holiday weekend I spent a bit of time updating my docker containers (I know, rock-n-roll!). One of the tools I've been hearing good things about is pwndbg, an open source plugin for GDB which aims to help with exploit development. I've always been a fan of peda, which provides similar functionality, but seeing the integration that pwndbg had with radare2, I couldn't help but give it a shot. To install the tool, I used the provided installation instructions... Read More »

Revisiting PlaidCTF - bigpicture

During the PlaidCTF challenge, there were a couple of binaries which, whilst I had a general idea of how the vulnerability worked, I couldn't complete in time to grab a flag. This has been bugging me since the end of the CTF, so I wanted to revisit one such challenge and see what I was missing. That challenge was "bigpicture". To begin with, you are given a simple description... Read More »

PlaidCTF - no_mo_flo writeup

This weekend I joined team NeverTry on PlaidCTF. One of the interesting challenges that I attempted was the "no_mo_flo" reverse engineering exercise. The description provided was simple... Can you go with the flow? To begin with, we load the challenge in IDA Pro. After some parsing, we see the first step is to read 0x20 bytes from STDIN... Read More »

BSidesSF CTF - DNSCap Walkthrough

Of all the BSidesSF CTF challenges, I think this one has to be my favourite. Combining a mix of packet capture analysis, scripting, frustration, and trying to beat the clock. The brief provided by the challenge was quite straight forward... Read More »