The Summer of PWN

Summer Plans

Now that I finished the HEVD series of posts, it’s time for me to switch gears. The series became more of a chore as I progressed and the excercise felt quite silly for a few reasons. Primarily, there are still so many fundamental binary exploitation concepts that I still don’t know. Why was I spending so much time on very esoteric material when I haven’t even accomplished the basics? The material was tied closely to my wanting to take AWE with Offsec, but since that is not happening, I get to focus now on going back to the basics.

For the forseeable future, I’m going to be working primarily on leveling up my pwn skills by doing CTF challenges, reversing, analyzing malware, and developing.

Some of the tools I’m going to be using this summer (I’ll update this as I go along):

• the ‘Nightmare’ CTF pwn challenge repo
• Modern Binary Exploitation
• protostar
• ROP Emporium

I will be keeping a daily log of everything I do and will publish it so those trying accomplish similar goals can see what I tried. I’ll also make a post at the end detailing what went right and what went wrong.

I’m taking a purposeful break from blogging so that I can focus on leveling up. Blogging takes a lot of my time and it’s interfering with my ability to put hours into getting better. I will hopefully be able to do a write-up detailing how I exploited a bug I found in another Windows kernel mode driver.

Keeping track of the Linux pwn challenge exploits here.

Until then, see you on the other side!