This original short story — about a rogue AI living in an Amazon-like datacenter — was inspired by brilliant research from several of my classmates at the MIT AI Lab during my undergrad. They showed the world that “machine learning” could just as easily be hacked as any other computer system, with fascinating consequences.

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If you’re looking for a new fandom to obsess about in the new year, or just some entertainment to pass the time during quarantine, take a look at some of what I’ve discovered in recent games, books, TV, and films.

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New year, new job, and now an all-new battlestation setup! You might know that I have an obsession with ergonomics and productivity boosting, and now that I’ve finally moved out of college dorm rooms, I went all out and painstakingly customized my work station to fulfill all my needs.

What’s even better, I did it on a low budget without any compromises. I really hit the sweet spot of cost effectiveness — either buying top-of-the-line when it was worth it, or getting better value from mid-tier products. The total came out to just under $2k and has absolutely everything you might want for maximum comfort during long hacking sessions.

In this post, I’ll break down the process of constructing my battlestation by discussing each component and giving tips on how to find the right equipment for yourself.

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Perhaps the best investment that you could make in your own learning, knowledge retention, and organization is a good note-taking application. Over the years, I’ve dumped all of my accumulated knowledge about computer science, security, and technology into various note-taking apps, ensuring that I can easily recall information from the thousands of different sources that I’ve found useful.

This post will be a general braindump of the factors behind choosing a note-taking app, a shameless plug for my favorite one, Quiver, and an explanation of how I use a note-taking app effectively.

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During a weekend hackathon with some of the Lincoln Lab maintainers of PANDA, I implemented a really useful feature — time-travel debugging!

As has been discussed in Ret2Systems’ great blog post, time-travel debugging is an invaluable tool in the reverse engineer’s arsenal. While Mozilla’s brilliant rr is the dominant choice for Linux user binaries and WinDBG Preview works on Windows binaries, PANDA can debug user and kernel space on both systems.

In this blog post, I’ll talk about the simple design behind reverse-execution and demonstrate its utility in root-causing a Linux kernel n-day.

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The Three-Body Problem trilogy, by brilliant Chinese author Cixin Liu, is a triumph of human creativity that I’ve previously extolled as one of the greatest sci-fi epics of all time. This short story was written in 2016, and is based off of events in the spectacular final book, Death’s End.

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Category: pwnable      |      Points: 124      |      Solves: 49      |      Challenge files

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> checksec mario
[*] '/home/raywang/ctf/DEFCONQ2018/mario'
    Arch:     amd64-64-little
    RELRO:    Full RELRO
    Stack:    Canary found
    NX:       NX enabled
    PIE:      PIE enabled

Summary

This is a classic C++ menu challenge that features a UAF and heap overflow with a vtable pointer overwrite. The main heap techniques involve using a free unsorted bin chunk to leak a libc and heap address, as well as some feng shui to place an object in an overflow-able region on the heap. fortenforge, qzqxq, and I combined to reverse the binary and discover the 3 separate vulnerabilities.

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I discovered my interest in film at the start of college. As an arts reviewer for The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper, I had the luxury of attending advance press screenings of big-name films like Suicide Squad and the final Hobbit film. But more importantly, my reviews cultivated an appreciation for the medium and an insatiable desire to experience all it had to offer. Since then, I’ve devoured films of all genres and eras, directors and actors, cinematographers and writers.

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Thanks to Vlad Brown and Drawings Team for Russian and Uzbek translations.

In Fall 2017, I took MIT’s 6.826, Principles of Computer Systems, taught by Turing Award-winner Butler Lampson, Nickolai Zeldovich, and Frans Kaashoek. Despite its rudimentary title, it’s a grad class on building formally verified systems. Using the proof language Coq, we wrote specifications, implementations, and proofs of toy structures: a remapped disk, an atomic pair of blocks, and a replicated disk. We also read quite a few papers from the state-of-the-art in formal methods.

I went into the class believing that formal verification is the future — the only solution to a world of software ridden with bugs and security issues. But after recent events and a semester of trying to apply formal methods, I’m a serious skeptic. In this post, I’ll discuss why I think formal verification has a long way to go — and why it just doesn’t work right now.

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In this post, I’ll walk through how to link an application against LLVM and show a simple usage of the LLVM McDisassembler API. It’s a little more complex that it seems, probably because there’s not many good resources for using this API.

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