An Image Speaks a Thousand RCEs: The Tale of Reversing an ExifTool CVE

A tweet showing an RCE in ExifTool popped up on my feed; it looked interesting — maybe a little scary. But what good is an RCE on a demo video? I wanted more; I wanted it to pop my calculator.exe, to rm -rf my home directory; heck, it could even Rick Roll me. However, like with all things in life, there was no publicly-available proof-of-concept. So I decided to make my own....

May 18, 2021 · 15 min · Amal Murali

Solving Intigriti Challenge using… Content Injection!

Intigriti releases cool challenges every once in a while, and this was no exception. I love a good challenge. Every time I solve an Intigriti challenge, I learn something new. Motivated by that, I wanted to crack this one too. As usual, there were many dead-ends, moments of frustration and head-scratches. However, I’ll save your scalp from the scratching and walk you through this challenge. The Challenge Right after the tweet, I opened up the challenge link:...

April 20, 2020 · 8 min · Amal Murali

h1–702 CTF — Web Challenge Write Up

This writeup has since won the H1–702 challenge. Read HackerOne blog here: https://www.hackerone.com/blog/H1-702-CTF-Winners-Announced When you open the challenge link, you’re presented with this: Instructions can be found on the web challenge site: http://159.203.178.9/ Open the link in your browser and you’re greeted with a normal-looking HTML page: Notes RPC CTF homepage It sounds like there is a secret endpoint somewhere that allows you to store notes. The title indicates that it has something to do with RPC....

July 1, 2018 · 13 min · Amal Murali

Solving the Dog Problem — Google CTF 2018 Quals Write Up

Challenge Description Cat Chat app popup Getting familiarized When you open the link, it redirects you to a chat room with a random UUID which is probably the chat room ID. Challenge homepage This looks like a chat application built with NodeJS where anyone can join and chat with each other. If you use /name bob, your display name gets changed to that. If you type /report, an admin will join the room for a few seconds....

June 8, 2018 · 11 min · Amal Murali