Reverse-Engineering 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.

Ghidra

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:15:00 +0100

Ghidra: Reading a Binary Like Source Code

Ghidra is the free, open-source reverse-engineering suite released by the NSA. Its headline feature is a genuinely excellent decompiler that turns compiled machine code back into readable C-like pseudocode — for most challenges it’s the difference between squinting at assembly for an hour and reading the logic in five minutes. It’s the tool I reach for first on any reversing binary, and it’s what cracked Go Go Decompile in the Brunner 2026 set.

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.