Pwn on Adamino CTF Writeups

Matching the Remote with Docker (glibc pinning)

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:30:00 +0100

Matching the Remote with Docker: glibc Pinning for Pwn

Here’s the failure mode that eats hours: your exploit works flawlessly on your machine, then does nothing against the remote. Nine times out of ten the culprit is the C library. libc offsets — the distance from a leaked puts to system, from system to a /bin/sh string, the exact one_gadget constraints — are specific to the exact glibc build on the target. Your local Ubuntu’s libc is almost never byte-identical to the challenge’s.

pwntools & checksec

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:00:00 +0100

pwntools & checksec: The Binary Exploitation Workbench

If you do any amount of binary exploitation, pwntools is the library that turns a fiddly, error-prone process into a few readable lines of Python. It handles the plumbing — spawning the target, talking to it over a socket, packing addresses into the right byte order, parsing leaked pointers — so you can spend your brain on the actual bug. checksec, which ships alongside it, is the thirty-second triage you run first on every binary to know what you’re up against.

Mindbreaker

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 13:05:48 +0200

Challenge Name: pwn_mindbreaker

Category: PWN

Difficulty: Very Hard

Author: Anakin

Challenge Description

INTERNAL MEMO: Automation & Robotics Division

Back when Brunnerne Inc.™ was still a home bakery, someone automated the cake-decorating line with a LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 brick. Several restructurings later, nobody remembers how the firmware works, but it is load-bearing, so we do not touch it.

Pure Notes

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:18:50 +0200

Category: PWN

Difficulty: Medium-Hard

Author: Vincent

Challenge Description

My boss said that our current note taking solution isn’t productive and functional. So I made this purely functional note taking app.

We get the full Haskell source (Main.hs), a Dockerfile, and a flag.txt. The program is a classic heap-note menu — new, write, writehex, view, delete, list — but written in Haskell on top of the C FFI allocator.

Locked Out

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:01:49 +0200

Category: PWN

Difficulty: Medium

Author: Togby & Nissen

Challenge Description

After Brunnerne Inc. refused to raise our wages, us bakers on the factory floor went on a huge strike. Management responded with a lockout - and apparently changed all our PIN codes.

Brunner Stocks

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 20:42:19 +0200

Category: PWN

Difficulty: Easy-Medium

Author: Vincent

Points: 100

Challenge Description

Brunnerne Inc. just released their state of the art automated stock trading algorithm. Just answer this simple survey on your investment preferences and we will handcraft a custom stock trading algorithm for you.

Netcat

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:12:28 +0100

Unleashing Netcat’s Potential in Capture The Flag (CTF) Challenges

Netcat, often referred to as the “Swiss army knife” of networking, is a versatile utility that reads and writes data across network connections using the TCP/IP protocol. Its flexibility and ease of use make it an invaluable tool in Capture The Flag (CTF) challenges, where participants seek to exploit vulnerabilities and capture hidden flags. Let’s delve into the myriad ways Netcat can be utilized in CTF scenarios.