2025 03 28

    Helloha,
    been a while. A lot has happened. Hope y’all have been staying well. The satellite is finally finished & handover is complete. Now the team is currently recuperating in what I’d call an interlude, as we await our next project from R&D. Been competing in a couple of CTFs as well, with both great & poor performance. For one, I was practically useless since they have no reverse engineering challenges. Between these & that, I probably cannot recount most of what matters.
    I’ve finished basic stack overflow exploitation from guyinatuxedo’s nightmares & moved onto ROP. Giving quite a hard time, but it is quite interesting. While ROP itself was ingenious, I gotta give credit to techniques such as stack pivoting as well, as it is simply so cool. About to start learning SIGROP, & I hope this journey continues to be fun. I have started reversing Windows binaries as well, & it feels surprisingly alien to me. While I am currently following the Ghidra book, the decompilation of msvc binaries don’t make sense to me, especially their calling conventions or entry flow. To make matters worse, I tried reversing a Windows binary compiled from C++ & boy I have never seen something worse. Saying C++ is the same as C, or close to, cannot be further when you look under the hood. The goddamn equivalence operator is a function! With their excessive use of functions to implement OOP in addition to the god awful naming (unsure if it’s C++’s compiler’s fault or Ghidra) to functions & argument ordering makes for quite a hellish scene. Well, what better to do than keep grinding away?
    Another reversing task I have taken on is trying to rip resources from a game. They encoded a .dat file in such a way that 1. it somehow contains the resource since the game uses it & 2. The .dat file is readable by WinRar but is password-protected (can read the file names within the directory but no contents). From it we can definitely see .ogg files, so I am almost certain in being able to recover some form of audio. It just struck me that maybe I could use binwalk to try extracting. Not too into DFIR so don’t cite me on that. Another preemptive cheers to this completion.
    As the window for internship offers roll by, it feels depressing looking back on my situation. This reflection brought me to wonder if my trajectory is correct. I am an aspiring malware analyst, but after research that should have been done sooner, I now face the dilemma that it is a near-impossible job to land for someone of my stature. Not only is the job too technical to be available as an internship, but even within the field the job itself is niche. Additionally, few certifications for this field exist, & when they do, they are expensive as fuck. Apparently it is recommended to start as any other aspiring cybersecurity expert would, in SOC, DFIR, or pentesting. However, it feels disheartening to know I would have to start from scratch, & my lack of affinity compared to malware analysis to these fields have at times made me question my desire to continue in this field. I really enjoy learning more about systems through reverse engineering & exploitation but can this be found in these other fields? Alas, I shouldn’t be jumping to conclusions, since I have to give them a try first. This is also a good chance for me to improve on other CTF fields since I am currently a rev one-trick, & have been meaning to get into either web & crypto. Crypto is definitely reasonable considering my interests in malware & rev, but web although I find fascinating, cannot find much justification. I would have to look more into how web can help, but either ways I will likely end up learning it anyway because I find it interesting.
    Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before but I have taken a break from Clover Day’s. Currently bouncing between Nukitashi, Hoshimemo Eternal Hearts, & Sanoba Witch. I have invested quite a bit into Nukitashi & Sanoba Witch, having finished both’s common route, while Hoshimemo takes a bench position. Initially read a lot of Nukitashi & finished Hinami’s route. Who could have thought a nukige could be so peak. The action-esque narrative paired with really great characters & dynamics really set the scene for a great read. Sometimes I can’t help but notice how Hinami’s smile looks uncannily big though. The remaining available heroines unfortunately do not appeal to me as much, as Misaki feels quite bland & since I dislike gyarus Nanase is a no. I am anticipating Fumino’s route, however. A loli in a kimono wielding a sniper rifle cannot not catch someone’s interest. That being said, currently on a de facto break from Nukitashi as I just finished up Sanoba Witch’s common route. Enjoyed quite a significant amount so far, definitely more than Riddle Joker. Just began Ayachi’s route, & hope it at least continues being a great read. It seems to promise more than Riddle Joker, but here is where the differences will matter, if there are any. Riddle Joker’s character routes really suffered bar Nanami’s, so if Sanoba Witch’s chara routes hold, it will make for an all around great game having seen a great common route.
    Man, I think I have been overworking this computer a bit. Feels slow af sometimes & it does weird shit such as randomly powering off (not shut down, just blip out). Modeling software, Docker, VMs, IDEs, etc, etc. Hope it holds up, though. I’ll be trying not to burden it even more.