babush.me

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It’s a me, Babush!

I’m Paolo Montesel. I do low-level engineering: tooling, compilers, reverse engineering. Mostly I enjoy mashing together technologies that were never meant to touch each other.

When I reverse something these days it’s mostly vibe RE. I let the LLMs grind through the boring parts and go manual only when they give up. I build the opposite too, see llvm-jutsu below.

Right now I’m a software engineer at Hex-Rays (yes, the IDA Pro people). I build binary-analysis tooling, obsess over binary similarity, do large-scale analysis of binaries, and build information-retrieval systems around all of it.

HITCON CTF 2020 Writeup

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 12:00:00 +0100

Wassup wassup wassup wassuuuuuuuup! C-T-eeeeeF!

So, after a somewhat long time out of the CTF scene, I played with my team mhackeroni.

This is my (short) writeup for challenge Run Run Run and L’Obscurité (I know you only care about the latter, so I put it at the end :P). Only 1 solve in the world, baby.

~~We also have an asciinema today, so don’t miss the conclusion!~~ Sorry, link is dead.

My Greatest Hack: How I Flew Over The Dodo's Nest

Sat, 02 May 2020 12:00:00 +0200

This is a story about my childhood.

Somewhere after 2001, the year Grand Theft Auto III was released, my eldest brother brought home a copy of the game for the PC. At that time we were sharing a family desktop machine that our parents bought for us, splitting the time using the famous your brother is two meters tall and can kick your ass scheduling algorithm. It is also known as the completely unfair scheduling algorithm in Computer Science circles.

CtfZone 2019 Quals - Chicken WriteUp

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 02:00:00 +0100

Time to try to put together a writeup of a challenge I think only us of mhackeroni solved. Given that there were only a few reversing challenges, I put on my web-guy hat and started going down the rabbit hole.

Spoiler alert: I will explain not only the solution, but also my discovery process, which I think is way more interesting than a pre-cooked meal.

Introduction

When we opened http://web-chicken.ctfz.one/, we were presented with a nice website about chickens and stuff.

code2vec TL;DR

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0100

Recently, I made some slides about code2vec, a machine learning work using deeplearning to turn the abstract syntax tree of functions into continuous vectors… Basically, word2vec applied to programming languages. I think I managed to sum up decently the main points of the paper, so I decided to share it here.

While I’m at it, here’s a very good list of papers about doing machine learning on code by the guys at source{d}.

Dumbo: LLVM-based Dumb Obfuscator

Sat, 23 Feb 2019 02:02:00 +0100

So you want to learn how to build the most awesome obfuscator known to human being? I’ve got you covered!

In this tutorial you will learn all sorts of obfuscation things. Like, obfuscators, what do they obfuscate? Do they obfuscate things? Let’s find out!

Introduction

LLVM is one of the most amazing pieces of code someone could find on the Internet. It is a compiler that is widely used both in research and in practical applications because of its flexibility. Its main selling point is that it decouples the programming language it’s compiling from the code generation.

MyTIM Vulnerability

Fri, 12 May 2017 14:05:00 +0200

TL;DR: Any app installed on your phone can perform privileged operations on TIM backends, without any kind of authentication. This makes it possible, for example, to obtain confidential data (tax ID, credit card, etc…) or activate services without any kind of intervention from the user.

As many people probably know, some TIM apps allow you to log in automatically without having to enter a username/password. This only happens when the phone is connected through the TIM mobile network (not Wi-Fi). Curious about this, I took a look at the MyTIM app to see how this functionality was implemented. This particular app is especially interesting because it’s the one used to manage offers/promotions, not to mention payments and top-ups.

Hello, World!

Fri, 12 May 2017 01:05:00 +0200

Welcome to my new website :)