1. Microcorruption: Reykjavik

    Wed 03 May 2023

    After my first Real Hacker Moment(TM) in Cusco, I was excited to see what Iceland had in store.

    The Scenario

    The manual for this exercise informed me I was up against hardware version A and software revision 2 or 3. There was no HSM I'd have to consider here …

    read more
  2. Microcorruption: Cusco

    Wed 03 May 2023

    The Scenario

    The exercise informed me I was up against hardware version B, but now running software revision 2. I still had a LockIT Pro HSM-1 to contend with (but more likely bypass entirely), but by this point I was fairly confident in what I expected from the firmware.

    Understanding …

    read more
  3. Microcorruption: Hanoi

    Mon 01 May 2023

    After cleaning up in Sydney, I touched down in Hanoi to face my greatest challenge yet: a bit of actual challenge.

    The Scenario

    The manual for the Lockitall LockIT Pro of this level is different, letting me know I'm up against hardware version B, software revision 1 - now featuring a …

    read more
  4. Microcorruption: Sydney

    Mon 01 May 2023

    My jaunt to New Orleans was easy enough, but as I said at the time things will only get harder and I was in the mood for a challenge when I made my way down under.

    The Scenario

    Upon opening the exercise I am once again presented with the manual …

    read more
  5. Microcorruption: New Orleans

    Mon 01 May 2023

    Preamble

    Way way back in the before times, I started this online reverse engineering/binary exploitation CTF called Microcorruption, but never finished it and ultimately forgot about it. But no longer - I have decided to return to Microcorruption in the hopes of conquering it and writing up my solutions in …

    read more
  6. Four Cores Are Better Than One

    Wed 29 March 2023

    Occasionally my mind regains the ability to recall something from more than two weeks in the past, the latest item being a blog post I read on the relative power of shell parallelization. Recently I found myself dreading an enormously parallelizable task and decided in lieu of spending 45 seconds …

    read more
  7. Flashing Heads On A Lenovo X220

    Mon 27 February 2023

    Preamble

    As a member of the infosec dork tribe of the computer yeller nation I have a travel laptop I use for attending conferences, but its intermittent wifi almost torpedoed my presentation at BSides last year so this year I decided a change was in order; luckily being a computer …

    read more
  8. Needing Vital Memory Expeditiously For A Raspberry Pi

    Wed 25 January 2023

    Prologue

    This statement shouldn't come as a shock to anyone who's handled them for an extended period of time, but SD cards are one of the worst storage options to run a computer from - putting the godawful latency and throughput of your average card aside, the low-quality flash is almost …

    read more
  9. YOLO Phone Service Search Results

    Mon 02 January 2023

    I wrote a blog post last year about finding a phone to use for clandestine communications and ended it by saying I would create a follow-up post about what service to use alongside said phone. Welp, I finally bothered to turn my notes into an actual post, so it's time …

    read more
  10. My Little Profiler: Flamegraph is Magic

    Mon 12 December 2022

    Until recently, profilers were a tool I'd heard people gushing over but never gotten around to trying myself. I put ox_profile on my list of neat tools to try out when I heard of it at PyCon in 2019 and replaced it with Scalene when I heard of that at …

    read more