Programming

It’s been a while since I wrote a post and I’m also going to make this one a short one. Python Fire is a pretty cool Python library from Google that lets you turn any Python script into a command line tool, this means that you don’t have to write any logic for handling command line parameters and options, but, if you script has sophisticated use cases then you’ll be probably be better by using argparse from the standard library....

I’ve been reading the MIASM.re blog recently and I wanted to give miasm a try. The scope of this article is to provide guidance on how to build miasm on macOS and introduce miasm to my readers. Miasm is a free and open source (GPLv2) reverse engineering framework. Miasm aims to analyze / modify / generate binary programs. Here is a non exhaustive list of features: – https://github.com/cea-sec/miasm/ If you’re curious about miasm’s powers you should give these articles a quick read:...

Keygenme or Not is a cute reversing challenge I found on root-me.org. It requires an username and an activation key. I particularly enjoyed this challenge and decided to make a blog post about it. The twist of this challenge is that you can solve it without writing any code, thus the name ‘Keygenme or Not’. If you want to solve this challenge but you’re stuck you should definitely give it one more try because solving it is very easy....

I started reading this book in november and it took me about two weeks to finish it. You should be a bit comfortable Linux and programming if you plan to give it a try. Here are my thoughts about it. What I like the most about this book is that it explains the subject in a straightforward and concise way! The author is a very knowledgeable security researcher and his work is state of the art!...

I signed up for the Database Design course at my university, the courses are great but the practical laboratories are not, it’s just a bunch of tiresome SQL queries and incomplete instructions. If you too have to do a lot of tiresome SQL queries I suggest the following setup: Download Docker. Download any Intellij IDE (if you’re a student you can get it for free). Preferably DataGrip. After you installed the aforementioned tools you start with a some docker commands:...

Lately I’ve been busy with university, work and learning something new. I’ve started my programming journey when I was in high school with Python, I didn’t have any informatics classes so I had to study on my own. I confess that I didn’t really understood how Python works, until I’ve tried Java. Python had a dynamic type system and it was very confusing for a newbie like me. After finishing Introduction to Computing with Java course from HKUST on edX I started to get a better grasp on programming....

I had to do a project for a friend and because Hugo is a nice tool yet a bit uncomfortable to use, I decided to use Angular. After finishing the website’s routes, css and images I have the project to my friend and he had a bit of a trouble deploying it on his Apache server. His host wouldn’t allow .htaccess. Q.Q The solution? Rename index.html to contact.html, team.html, project.html, objectives....

PicoCTF is an amazing capture the flag competition targeting middle and high school students. It’s a game that consists in solving various computer security challenges from different domains, see the picture below. 🙂 While I’m just starting out to explore the field of computer security I feel that I’ve learned a lot doing these challenges, there are many other challenge sites on the internet but their difficulty is for experienced users, beginners like me often struggle as there are no hints and you don’t know how to tackle the problem....

As I’ve been reading Professional Assembly Language, I’ve come across chapter 13 and I liked it so much that I’m going to write a blog post about it. The book is quite nice if you’re interested in assembly for Linux. Extended ASM format let’s you write assembly code that interacts with any type of C data, such as local variables, strings, numbers, goto labels and so on. The format produces cleaner, safer and more efficient code than the Basic ASM format....

I wanted to explore the magic of RFID and I bought a simple card reader from Banggood which allows me to read and write 13.56MHz cards. The reader comes with one id tag and one card and it can be used to implement projects like a door security system or a payment system. The card and id tag that come with the board use classic mifare technology. Wiring I’m going to use Arduino Nano for this example, you can use Arduino UNO and perhaps other Arduino’s too....