Developmen

Advent of Code

Every year, in December, Eric Wastl organizes Advent of Code, an Advent calendar of programming puzzles of increasing difficulty that are super useful to learn a new language, brush your skills, or just for fun.

I have participated to the following years:

• 2021
• 2022

You can find my solutions in their git repository

Mojiharau (文字祓う)

A mojibake’d zip files fixer written in Rust. I sometimes encounter files with wrong encoding and they inflate to files with garbage filenames. Since the tool I found, Mojibake Fixer, does what I needed but only through web pages, I decided to reimlement it as a CLI application, allowing me to script it.

You can find it in its git repository

Ghidra-dark

I started using Ghidra as part of my capture-the-flag/reverse-engineering set of tools and I was annoyed by the lack of a dark theme. After searching the web I came across a Dark theme injector, that changed the theme, but not really in a way I liked. That’s wny I forked it and updated its implementation to use RGBA codes to configure colors and use FlatLaf’s IntelliJ themes.

You can find the code in its git repository

Microcorruption

I have been doing coding challenges for a long time, but during 2022 I started diving into the capture-the-flag/reverse-engineering challenges, as I have always been interested in reverse-engineering, and I was suggested to start with Microcorruption. The site presents increasingly complex implementations of a “smart” lock based on a TI MSP430 microcontroller and the user is asked to find a way to unlock the lock without knowing the password.

These challenges forced me to learn from direct experience how multiple low-level attacks work and how to use them.

I am currently at level “Novosibirsk”.

RustyProbe

While tackling the challenges in Microcorruption I came across a problem that required me to disassemble some binary code that was “generated” at runtime. After trying Microcorruption’s integrated disassembler (and due to an error in its use, I found later) I started looking for a local disassembler that helped me read MSP430 binary code.

After finding multiple applications that I couldn’t run or had other issues I decided to implement an MSP430 disassembler in Rust, called RustyProbe.

It was a fun experience, really!

pwn.college

As I found out that I needed more skills for capture-the-flag challenges than just assembly reverse-engineering I looked for that type of challenges for beginners and came across pwn.college, a college course by the Arizona State University dressed up like multiple capture-the-flag challenges.

pwn.college taught me about privilege escalation, jailbreaking, developing in assembly (e.g. a multithreaded web server), network interception, and much more.

Over the wire

Over the Wire is a collection of “Wargames” of increasing difficulty that require multiple different skills in security engineering to solve.

It’s a cool project handled by the community and, if I understood correctly, has a long history.