IFSF CTF #10 - Memories of never ending pain

Authors: Mitchell Adair, Scott Hand

The problem starts out with the following text :

"We succeeded on gaining access to an old machine. We found an interesting binary that requests for an authorization code.
We believe that this code is still used somewhere else.

http://ctf.forbiddenbits.net/tasks/10.exe

After opening the program in IDA, we realized it was an old-school DOS program. Installing DOS turned out to be a pain, so we ended up using a DOS emulator, DOSBOX (http://www.dosbox.com/). There are several version, so the debugging version is an import note.

To execute the program in DOSBOX you have to do 2 steps :

  1. Mount your harddrive, "mount c c:\users\myuser\myproblemdir"
  2. Debug the program in debugging mode, "debug 10.exe"

So... after playing around with the program in debug mode, and looking at the program in IDA, there are a few major components that make up this program.

Three main function calls that represent the control flow of the program

Looking a little more carefully at how the user input gets stored we see a little is applied to each character, before it is finally stored in [si]

We can also see exactly where the altered user input is compared to a hard coded string in the program. If a value does match dx get's or'd with 5, essentially acting as a flag

Finally, we now know what happens to our user input, and we can see the final string we must match. A little python script can solve this problem

And the solution is : 7R0LO101O