In this article, I will briefly go over how I integrated pwntools with radare2. The means by which I have accomplished this are generic and can be extended to integrate pwntools with your debugger of choice (for instance: IDA Pro, pwndbg, Binary Ninja, etc).

 

Like most techies, I have a constant struggle to get my setup working "just the way i like it". I have been a fan of pwntools for quite a while as it provides nice abstractions for things such as interacting with programs, utilizing memory leaks, and more. When it comes to interacting with programs, the abstraction layer allows you uniformly interact with a program, and not worry whether your program is being run locally, over a network, via ssh, and more. For reversing and writing exploits, it's often times helpful to run the program under a debugger. Pwntools provides an abstraction for that, in the form of the GDB module.

The HackIM challenge "Web6" was an interesting introduction into a technology called JSON Web Tokens. I had not actually noticed this standard prior to the challenge, but it's an interesting concept. The goal of JWT (as defined in RFC 7519) is to standardize a means to securely transfer "claims" between multiple services, allowing the client to hold said claim. This is certainly not a new concept, but a newer (2015) implementation.

This challenge was interesting in that the solution speaks to a core principle in cryptography. The challenge presented you with two, random looking character strings, and asked you to determine which was XOR encrypted data, and which was just random noise.

For this challenge we were given an address and port to connect to, but little other information. Upon connecting, we received the following:

                    __
          PyJail   /__\
       ____________|  |
       |_|_|_|_|_|_|  |
       |_|_|_|_|_|_|__|
      A@\|_|_|_|_|_|/@@Aa
   aaA@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@aaaA
  A@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@A
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[!] Rule
1. After 3 day, the Light will be Turned Off then you Cannot see anything.
2. Cannot Use Some Special Characters in PyJail.
3. For 10 days, You can enter 38 characters per day.

Can You Escape from Here ??

 Name : [day-1]
################## Work List ##################
  coworker        : Find Coworker For Escape
  tool            : Find Any Tool
  dig             : Go Deep~
  bomb            : make boooooooomb!!!
###############################################

Tokyo Western's CTF 2017 offered a neat simple cryptography challenge that was written in python. For the challenge, we are given the python source code that was used to encrypt, and the output of the encryption. The challenge is to determine what the original input was that produced the output we're given. While the proper solution here is likely to actually understand and reverse the algorithm, I took this as an opportunity to enable my tool pySym to solve this challenge.