As part of my obsession with the seminal Chinese blockbuster game Black Myth: Wukong , I've spent countless hours studying Chinese literature, language, and culture to better appreciate the rich lore and context of the story. This post serves as a record of my learning process, as well as a guide for other novice language learners seeking to immerse themselves in the refined beauty of Chinese…
The most hyped videogame release of this year might just be Black Myth: Wukong , a Chinese action RPG set in the fantasy world of Journey to the West . To improve my Chinese and be able to fully immerse myself in the game on release, I've been consuming anything I can find about it online. During public demos last year, players screen-captured a lore book called yǐng shén tú (影神图), an illustrated…
Since quarantine days, I’ve picked up a lot of hobbies. And if you know me, you know I’m not overselling myself — try surfing, archery, sporting clays, golf, coral reef aquarium-keeping, climbing, skateboarding, skiing, and travel for a start… Why? Full reasons unclear, but at least a combination of pure impulsiveness and a desire to challenge myself and become a more versatile person. Along the…
This original short story — about a rogue AI living in an Amazon-like datacenter — was inspired by brilliant research from several of my classmates at the MIT AI Lab during my undergrad. They showed the world that “machine learning” could just as easily be hacked as any other computer system, with fascinating consequences.
If you’re looking for a new fandom to obsess about in the new year, or just some entertainment to pass the time during quarantine, take a look at some of what I’ve discovered in recent games, books, TV, and films.
New year, new job, and now an all-new battlestation setup! You might know that I have an obsession with ergonomics and productivity boosting, and now that I’ve finally moved out of college dorm rooms, I went all out and painstakingly customized my work station to fulfill all my needs. What’s even better, I did it on a low budget without any compromises. I really hit the sweet spot of cost…
Perhaps the best investment that you could make in your own learning, knowledge retention, and organization is a good note-taking application. Over the years, I’ve dumped all of my accumulated knowledge about computer science, security, and technology into various note-taking apps, ensuring that I can easily recall information from the thousands of different sources that I’ve found useful. This…
During a weekend hackathon with some of the Lincoln Lab maintainers of PANDA , I implemented a really useful feature — time-travel debugging ! As has been discussed in Ret2Systems’ great blog post , time-travel debugging is an invaluable tool in the reverse engineer’s arsenal. While Mozilla’s brilliant rr is the dominant choice for Linux user binaries and WinDBG Preview works on Windows binaries,…
The Three-Body Problem trilogy, by brilliant Chinese author Cixin Liu, is a triumph of human creativity that I’ve previously extolled as one of the greatest sci-fi epics of all time. This short story was written in 2016, and is based off of events in the spectacular final book, Death’s End .
Category: pwnable | Points: 124 | Solves: 49 | Challenge files 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 > checksec mario [*] '/home/raywang/ctf/DEFCONQ2018/mario' Arch: amd64-64-little RELRO: Full RELRO Stack: Canary found NX: NX enabled PIE: PIE enabled Summary This is a classic C++ menu challenge that features a UAF and heap overflow with a vtable pointer overwrite. The main heap techniques involve using a free unsorted…
I discovered my interest in film at the start of college. As an arts reviewer for The Tech , MIT’s student newspaper, I had the luxury of attending advance press screenings of big-name films like Suicide Squad and the final Hobbit film . But more importantly, my reviews cultivated an appreciation for the medium and an insatiable desire to experience all it had to offer. Since then, I’ve devoured…
Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations. In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems , taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Frans Kaashoek. Despite its rudimentary title, it’s a grad class on building formally verified systems. Using the proof language Coq, we wrote specifications, implementations, and proofs…
In this post, I’ll walk through how to link an application against LLVM and show a simple usage of the LLVM McDisassembler API. It’s a little more complex that it seems, probably because there’s not many good resources for using this API.
I’m currently taking the Fall 2017 iteration of 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems . This class has been offered in various forms over the years, but this iteration is quite different. It focuses on formal verification of computer systems using Coq , a language for mechanical theorem proving. The goal of this class is to write the spec, implementation, and proofs for a formally verified RAID…
Into uncharted waters we venture… this set has some various problems about famous real-world vulnerabilities, and it was challenging. fortenforge and I worked together quite a bit to get through it.
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while — here I’ll describe all the excellent customizations that I’ve accrued over several years of optimizing my Mac for speed and alleviating repetitive stress injury (RSI). If you’re a Mac power user, or if you make a living at a keyboard, you want to read this.
It’s always bothered me that MIT or MIT Lincoln Lab didn’t submit anything to DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge. With all the smart people, such as my advisor, Armando Solar-Lezama, working on program analysis and formal methods (which I currently know nothing about), I would have expected that we could create a strong Cyber Reasoning System worthy of CGC. That’s sort of what I will be working on this…
The last of the original crypto challenges… here we go! Challenge 41 Implement unpadded message recovery oracle Unpadded RSA is homomorphic, meaning that, if operations like multiplication and addition are carried out on ciphertext, it is as if the same operation were applied to the plaintext.
Update 5/5/17: We qualified to DEF CON CTF 2017!!! We just got the email today! Congrats to everyone from Lab RATs, TechSec, and RPISEC that competed. Vegas, here we come!
Well, this was my first foray into the world of Rust, the systems language that is Mozilla’s precious baby. And what better way to learn this hip new language than to write an MITScript bytecode interpreter for Computer Language Engineering? Rust was not gentle for this first-time developer. It does so much to protect you that my first attempt writing a few hundred lines of code resulted in the…