The blog of mahaloz: all things hacking and computer science included!
The year 2024 was a resurgent year for decompilation. Academic publications from that year made up nearly 30% of all top publications ever made in decompilation. In this post, I do a summarization and retrospective of both the academic and ideological progress of decompilation in 2024. Hint: decompilation research is back.
A two-part series on the history of decompiler research and the fight against the unsolved control flow structuring problem. In part 1, we revisit the history of foundational decompilers and techniques, concluding on a look at modern works. In part 2, we deep-dive into the fundamentals of modern control flow structuring techniques, and their limitations, and look to the future.
A two-part series on the history of decompiler research and the fight against the unsolved control flow structuring problem. In part 1, we revisit the history of foundational decompilers and techniques, concluding on a look at modern works. In part 2, we deep-dive into the fundamentals of modern control flow structuring techniques, and their limitations, and look to the future.
A breakdown of a bug SEFCOM T0 and I exploited to achieve a WAN-side RCE in some Netgear RAX routers for pwn2own 2022. The bug is a remotely accessible command injection due to bad packet logging, cataloged as CVE-2023-24749.
Some common techniques used while reversing unknown architectures seen through the lens of an 80's game hacking challenge from 0CTF22
Reversing a Go binary to find it generates flawed RNG from a P256 Elliptic Curve chosen with a reversible P and Q for number generation. Solution based on the Dual EC crypto paper.
A series of game hacking challenges hosted in Tasteless 21. Decompiling, modifying, and recompiling Godot scripts to abuse client-side computations for a multiplayer game. Fly hacks, no-damage, super speed, and rng abuse.
Pwning a custom Tetris game through an out-of-bounds write to memory through block manipulation and changes to the `.text` segment.
Solving a virtual machine implemented inside format strings found in the printf library in C with @kylebot.
This was a challenge written for a programming languages and compilers course at ASU. This is meant to test your skill in lambda calculus.