Hurr durr durr

Lot's of rambling

[marvellous-attero]

I ended up learning some ARM assembly (for reverse engineering). I'm a completly new to ARM assembly, however I found some nice resources to learn basics:

registers, operations, memory

stack, calling conventions

ARM turns out to be pretty cool. Seems more modern than x64, you can start with an overview on wikipedia.

[marvellous-attero]

Python Cookbook, 3rd edition

Today I was hacking on passing NUL characters to C programms and I run into some problems (subprocess doesn't like nulls in arguments passed to execve) and I found Python Cookbook free available online, yay!

Enjoy!

[culturenlifestyle]

Intriguing Watercolor Eye Paintings by Jone Bengoa

Nineteen-year-old Spanish artists Jone Bengoa’s series of realistic watercolor portraits of the eyes are striking and highly emotive. Displaying a wide range of emotions from anger to sadness, Bengoa’s talent is used to its full extent to convey the metaphorical complexity of the human eye. Known as the windows to the soul, the artist showcases several different types of eye shapes and eye colors to illuminate human emotion. Produced in an abstract nature, Bengoa’s implementation of unconventional colors such as bright pinks and purples magnify the beauty of the eyes. The dripping effect is used more as a naturally occurring technique to exhibit the gentle, yet powerful quality of watercolors, which also reflect the essence of the human eye.

[marvellous-attero]

C + assembly side by side

I have a goal to get better in Reverse Engineering. Usually what you can get from binary is assembly (with gcc or IDA), so it makes sense to properly learn assembly.

So the easiest way is to write some C code, compile it and look at assembly.

This answer on stack overflow just made my day:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1289881/using-gcc-to-produce-readable-assembly

What you get is this <3.

[marvellous-attero]

Reverse engineering materials

I found

http://challenges.re/

http://beginners.re/

Enjoy!

[marvellous-attero]

Reversing + CTF practice

I'm a security/hacking noob. And I'm trying to improve my skills. So I decided to share some of the materials I'm using.

For example, I'm testing my skills on challenges from:

http://pwnable.kr/index.php

There are different levels of challenges there. Some of them are actually pretty easy and almost obvious, some are harder. And I've only tried challenges marked as 'easiest'.

I feel like a total beginner.

Tools:

pwntools http://pwntools.readthedocs.org/en/latest/intro.html

ipython + python

IDA

gdb with peda

xxd

Resources:

Hacking, art of exploitation, 2nd edition

Zrozumieć Programowanie by Gynvael Coldwind

Reverse Engineering tutorials by Gynvael Coldwind

[marvellous-attero]

Today I started working on a new shiny golang project and I wanted to remind myself, how to properly structure the go project.

The canonical "best way to do it" can be found in writing go code.

I also came across those slides.

Key take aways from slides:

few cool aliases

less config the better

What to not take away:

vendoring (there are better ways), for example this talk about dependency management.

My small project is here (IRC bot). It's still missing a ton of features, but at least I have a clear idea what I want to achieve.

[marvellous-attero]

Vim tip of the day

Ctrl + ^

Gets you to the previous location in vim. So for example if you check a symbol and after looking at its definition, you got lost, here's your rescue! Ctrl + ^ and you're back to the place you've been in before the move.

Credits go to stack overflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19971023/how-to-go-back-to-previous-opened-file-in-vim

[marvellous-attero]

Book - Zrozumieć Programowanie (Understanding programming)

A very cool Hacker, ekhem, Security Researcher, Gynvael Coldwind just published a book about programming. http://ksiegarnia.pwn.pl/produkt/293331/zrozumiec-programowanie.html

I've already read 3 chapters. The book is excellent, I hope that they're going to translate it to English. The author is Polish, and so am I so I'm lucky to be able to read it. The book has instantly gained popularity in Poland.

So why is it so special? It has a different focus than most of programming books, instead you learn about computer architecture (by building a vm and writing programms on it in assembly and writing interpreters for different languages in assembly @@), common standards in programming such as numbers and strings, processes, file formats, and synchronization, networking...

You also reverse engineer some stuff.

[marvellous-attero]

Really productive people

Today I've heard about Vaclav Smill http://www.vaclavsmil.com/

which has written 35 books, which are actually very good ones and 400 publications! That's a lot!

Today I was reading about papers and stumbled upon work of this lady: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/ListByYear.html

I'm amazed how productive people can be. Maybe I'm accustomed to different standards or something?

Well, nonetheless it's motivating to do more work.

[marvellous-attero]

Insipiring women in programming world

I was reading my quora feed when I stumbled accross this women: http://www.quora.com/Erin-Parker

and her story of learning and successful coding.

Here's her startup: http://spitfireathlete.com/

I think that those two women can be a nice role model for young women in IT world.

[marvellous-attero]

Capicua, by Animal Chuki

Really nice album.

[marvellous-attero]

P2P file sharing project

I've just spent a day and a half writing a p2p file sharing project.

It's working really nice. Files are downloaded really quickly (haven't done my benchmarks yet). I use udp to send data and checksums to ensure correctness.

However I haven't tested it over the real network yet.

If you're interested in a code - it's open source:

https://github.com/atteroTheGreatest/egoat

[marvellous-attero]

On being a senior engineer

I'm really inspired by this post:

http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/10/25/on-being-a-senior-engineer/

There is a lot of truth, I'm a junior now, gaining experience every day.

It's awesome to read some thoughts of really senior person in the same field.

What I really want to remember from this post is:

Every successful engineer I’ve met, upon finishing up a design or getting ready for a project, will continually ask their peers questions along the lines of:

“What could I be missing?”

“How will this not work?”

“Will you please shoot as many holes as possible into my thinking on this?”

“Even if it’s technically sound, is it understandable enough for the rest of the organization to operate, troubleshoot, and extend it?”

Whole blog actually looks pretty awesome. Looking forward to read all those long blogposts!

[marvellous-attero]

Tour of go

I've just finished a tour of go:

http://tour.golang.org/#1

It's an excellent interactive tutorial for go language. It twisted my mind in funny ways. Interfaces looks cool, concurrency is magically simple.

Some language elements are a bit unusual and I haven't got used to them yet. In every language I use - I need to feel confident at working with strings and collections. Easiest, most commonly used elements of language should be ingrained in my brain to be fast and easy to use and make me productive.

[marvellous-attero]

Git interactive staging

I was reading this piece today 

http://www.andyjeffries.co.uk/25-tips-for-intermediate-git-users/

and came across:

`git add --interactive`

I use git everyday, but actually I never used this particular flag. It was a bit counterintuitive at first so I quickly googled:

http://git-scm.com/book/en/Git-Tools-Interactive-Staging

Interactive staging in git is really cool. It's making life easier. I love git-scm.com it's a great resource to learn about git.