"Best Reverser" at PHDays III — Developer's Overview

When we put hand to the contest, we wanted to make it interesting, difficult and feasible at the same time.

We believe that a good reverser should be able to read computer code, convert it to a clear algorithm, find mistakes and flaws of this algorithm, and, if possible, to exploit them. Besides the code provided for analysis should be close to true software code.

The 64-bit Windows version was chosen as a platform, because Hex-Rays Decompiler for x86 makes everything easier and there are no decompilers for x64. And 64-bit applications have become common anyway.

So a small program with Qt (and static libraries) was developed. And the executable file was almost 10 MB. But is it unbearable for a talented reverser? Though, according to feedback, the file size scared some participants. On the other hand, Qt leaves a lot of useful information, and a reverser must know how to separate the wheat from the chaff...

The NetHack Challenge Detailed Review

During the Positive Hack Days III forum, the NetHack competition for experts in network security was held. The participants were to obtain access to five network devices and capture flags stored in the devices during 50 minutes. The game network included typical network infrastructure vulnerabilities discovered by the Positive Technologies experts during security analysis and penetration tests. Today we would like to bring to you attention a detailed review of the contest tasks.