Security/Hacking Team @ CMU

Introduction

Earlier this year, tylerni7 showed us a proof of concept for a 32 bit Go exploit using this issue. geohot and I had a wager over who could get the first remote code execution on play.golang.org: he won, but just barely ;-). Props also to ricky for helping to find the underlying cause/writing the patch. Here is a summary of how we did it.

Note: play.golang.org is properly sandboxed, so code execution there does not actually let you do anything. Had this been a more serious bug that could actually be used for anything malicious, we would have reported it and not used it as a CTF problem.

This post is cross posted on my personal blog, original post there.

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As many of you know, PPP recently ran its own CTF: PlaidCTF. As running a CTF tends to produce a lot of data, we thought it might be interesting to have a look at some of the statistics related to this data.

Upon first looking at the pCTF data, I was curious about the kinds of problems that were solved – as in, was one category more particularly heavily solved than another? Furthermore, how well did we do at weighting problems by difficulty?

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