GryphonCTF_2016:

Category: Pwn Points: 15 Description:

I just learned C last semester! Better put that to the test! Play it here: nc play.spgame.site 9993 Creator - Kelvin Neo (@deathline75)

Write-up

Credits to @zst123 [Manzel Seet] for helping with the general idea of this challenge. (OS duplication all me though).

We are given a source code for the calculator. On first look, it seems fairly simple, we just need to guess the random number and come up with integer sums to overflow into the negative. As we know, general unsigned 32 bit integers go from 0 to 2^32 - 1 and signed 32 bit integers go from -2^31 to 2^31 - 1. To overflow from 0 to negative -100, you need to add 2^32 - 1 - 100, or to effectively add 4,294,967,195.

This challenge however, tests much more on a deeper topic, on C's rand() and srand() function. If we take a look at the source code,

srand(time(NULL));
...
int j =  rand() % 12345678 * -1;
int r = j + 0;


We see that the secret number is rand() for an integer between 0 and -12345678 and we also see that srand(time(NULL)) seeds the random number generator with the timestamp.

Attempting to create a similar program, we find that somehow, the secret number in our script doesn't seem to correspond to the number in the server... what now? Well, apparently, C rand() function differs from OS to OS. If running the program on a MacBook OSX doesn't work, we can try... Ubuntu.

And thus, God said, let there be Dockerfile.

\$ docker run --rm ezpwn
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "./script.py", line 38, in <module>
raise Exception('GCTF FLAG FOUND %s' % data)
Exception: GCTF FLAG FOUND

Therefore, the flag is GCTF{5ub7r4c710n_by_h1dd3n_4dd1710n}.