I neither play CTFs, nor I do writeups for them. Well, both statements are not true anymore, but don’t expect too much CTF writeups on this blog anyway. The task was worth 500 points and according to my knowledge nobody submitted the flag on time (including me as well). So, enjoy the reading and I hope you will like it.
Category / crackmes
Solving warsaw’s Java Crackme 3
Every once in a while I’m posting solution to some crackme that I consider interesting. By interesting, I mean the solution, so it is not exactly about key generation algorithm but also about technology and tricks that are utilized. Looking at the traffic statistics, it seems that this topic isn’t exactly the one that people would like to read (three posts – 5,63% of total unique page views), but I’m truly convinced that it has great potential for every single person that wants to learn something new. All in all, there is at least one person that benefits from those tutorials – ME :) Back to the topic, in this post I’ll describe warsaw’s Java Crackme 3. Crackme was published on 14th October 2012 on crackmes.de, I’ve picked it up around February 2013, so literally speaking, it took me one year to solve it (of course I had some huge breaks meanwhile). Difficulty of the crackme was set to 5 (Professional problem to solve) in the crackmes.de scale and I must fully agree with it. It is Java crackme, but it wasn’t written in Java, I’m 99% sure that it was written in Jasmin or other assembler for Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Hand-crafted assembler and bunch of obfuscation tricks renders all existing decompilers pretty much useless, so it will not be yet another simple Java analysis.
Solving RedBeanSoup’s 1st Crackme (IronPython)
I’ve solved this little crackme quite some time ago, but I haven’t had time to publish the results. Besides this, protection wasn’t too hard, so I wasn’t sure if there is really anything to publish. Crackme was published on 14 January 2010 on crackmes.de, difficulty was set to 3 (Getting harder). Honestly speaking, without IronPython I would say that difficulty of this crackme is 1 (Very easy, for newbies, in the terms of crackmes.de scale), but with IronPython… well, it proved to be hard enough for me. Below analysis will shed some light on IronPython internals, there will be also part about .NET (as IronPython is just .NET Python), I’ll also cover the protection part, but it will not take too much space.
Solving |sas0|’s “The Game” crackme (.NET)
Another approach to crackmes solving, this time it is .NET crackme written by |sas0|. I’ve found it on crackmes.de, it was published on 27 November 2012, difficulty was set to 3 – Getting harder. I’ve decided to give it a try as I don’t have much experience with .NET targets. It took me 3 days to solve it, but I consider those three days as a good time investment, because I had a chance to learn a few new things. So, here is my story:
Solving gim913’s KeygenMe#01
Due to permanent lack of time and really long personal TODO list I’m not frequent crackme-solver, but sometimes it is good to check if my skills didn’t get rusty. I’ve browsed through unsolved crackmes on crackmes.de and found quite new gim913’s crackme that was unsolved for almost 2 months (yup, I know that it’s not much :) ). Knowing reputation of the author I’ve decided to give it a try, as probably there will be something interesting inside. So, let’s start.