Fascinating Confusion

Gloater was a pwn challenge with an insane difficulty rating during the Cyber Apocalypse 2024. While it had the most difficult rating, it wasn't the pwn with the least solves. But it was still an interesting challenge with many options to gain code execution. This writeup certainly presents a ... let's call it special way ;)

Deathnote was a pwn challenge with medium difficulty during the Hackthebox Cyber Apocalypse 2024. The challenge presented was a typical heap challenge allowing us to create, delete, and remove chunks. The LIBC given was Ubuntu GLIBC 2.35-0ubuntu3.6 . The solution involves getting a libc leak and calling a special helper function.

Superfast was an "easy" exploit challenge during the HTB Business CTF 2022. While rated easy I found it to be rather tricky. The challenge was based on a custom shared library loaded into php and exposed through a webserver.

Time for another writeup on this totally well maintained blog 👀. Insider was an exploit challenge during the 2022 Business CTF from HackTheBox named DirtyMoney. It was based on a simple FTP Server with a fun easteregg and different bugs and ways to exploit it.

This writeup describes an exploit which does in fact not use libc or one_gadget or any hooks .

TCalc was a pwnable challenge during the recent Hack.lu CTF 2019. It was worth 381 points and rated medium. As all somewhat more difficult exploit challenges, it was a heap challenge. Somewhat unusual was the usage of libc version 2.30, which I haven't seen much in CTFs. The bug was a very fascinating programming error resulting in an OOB array access that could be used to arbitrary free. This write-up will try to not only describe the solution but also the pitfalls and things that didn't work.