Sunday, February 23, 2014

CodeGate CTF 2014 - Reverse 250 Clone Technique Write-up

Hi,
The concept of this Crackme is really simple but reaching the right Track took me hours and hours because I was looking deeper into it and the answer was right in front of me :) ...
The challenge is named "Clone Technique" used in Naruto Manga ,  the process creates many instances of it (using CreateProcessW) with different command line arguments (3 values).
Example :
2nd process : clone_technique.exe 3026539702 3580248161 2
3rd process : clone_technique.exe 466510610 2867152813 3
4th process : clone_technique.exe 2580226910 609694577 4


The wrong way that I took was fortunately of some benefit because what I did is analyze how the values are generated and I also simulated the algorithm in ASM (check links below).
In the first place I didn't know how the flag would be and I couldn't get any hints so I tried to look and look until I found this weird string in the .data section :
I've put a breakpoint on access to this string and ran the program, then the debugger breaks at a function at : 00401070 (you can also check all the references to this string and you'll find the "push 00407030" to our function).
This function takes 3 arguments : - the first value in the cmdline , the second value and a pointer to the string.
The function will use both values in a loop to decrypt each byte alone of the string and store it in a seperated memory location pointed by EDX using the instruction :
004010E8  |. 8802           |MOV BYTE PTR DS:[EDX],AL
The function returns a pointer to the decrypted string in EAX (the decryption result will be non-ASCII until the used values -keys- are right).

If you have a clear idea now , you will notice that each process will be created with its own cmd line arguments , thus different keys to decrypt the string , thus different result. So we'll need to show the final decrypted string for each process until finding a readable ASCII string.
We'll need to patch the executable and create a code cave which will pop up a MessageBox whenever the string is decrypted (we can also display only the ASCII compatible string which will only be the flag) . I was lazy and tired so , I just put a MessageBox call and kept pressing enter until seeing the flag :

Jump to code cave

 We don't have to forget to NOP a "REP STOS" instruction that will cause an access violation after redirecting the execution to our cave code.
Now save the executable , run it and you should see MessageBoxes with total gibberish (invalid key decrypting the string) , keep clicking and clicking and clicking until this will popup :

The Flag.

Script which will generate the same values passed in the command line (complete waste of time :) ) : http://pastebin.com/tcRdpEKF

Regards.

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