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Using the Linux kernel to help me crack an executable quickly
Early this year I found a reverse engineering problem which basically boiled down to running a heavily obfuscated Linux binary and entering the correct number to get it to print a flag. Fortunately, the interesting bits of the program ran quite fast – after reading the input, it spends around 5us before printing out whether the guess was correct or not. This means that even a brute-force search of the possible inputs could finish in a reasonable time, and there is no need to expend much effort on actual reverse engineering if we don't have to. The only tricky part is, how do we convince it to try different inputs as fast as this?
Blazingly⚡ fast🚀 packet processing with DPDK
Recently at work I have been learning about this fancy framework we are using in a product with high-performance networking requirement — the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK). It is a set of user-space NIC drivers and related utility libraries (like fast buffer pools or queues) that enables an application to bypass the Linux kernel's networking stack, and directly send and receive packets from the hardware...
CMake: A build system generator for pretty much anything
If you have been compiling open-source programs for some time, you almost certainly have used CMake. It's a very popular Makefile generator for C/C++ projects. Recently I have been trying to use CMake for non-C projects, and I find it worked well — CMake build scripts might not be so easy to write at first, but they are very flexible and can certainly be helpful if you want a custom build system for your project...