Load (glibc) DWARF debug symbols in Ghidra

Today, I was doing a pwning challenge (maybe more on this on a future blog post) and for some stupid reason, I wanted to load the glibc of my system on Ghidra. 99% of the times there is no real good reason to load glibc on Ghidra. That being said, loading other symbols for other binaries can be useful in other scenarios, hence the post. This guide will cover symbols in DWARF (.debug) format. Other symbol formats exist (E.G. map files), some scripts enable partial support of those but they are deemed out-of-scope for the purpose of this post. ...

11 October 2024 · 3 min · 545 words · Jacopo Scannella

Backport Software to Nix Using Overlays

I know, I know… It’s been almost two years since the last time I wrote here. Well.. I had stuff to do! I am still studying for my masters degree, but I had some major step forwards in many other directions. One of those was picking up NixOs, a great operating system powered by the almighty Nix package manager. There are various reasons behind this choice and I will probably expose them once I installed it as my main system on most of my boxes. ...

4 January 2022 · 4 min · 709 words · Jacopo Scannella

GPG Offline Volume Handbook

Disclaimer: all the “knowledge” you can find in this post, is obtained by trial and error, documentation reading and years of struggling using GPG. Some information may be out of date or just incorrect. Disclaimer 2: as many others point out, GPG is not the easiest software to deal with. Moreover its codebase is dated and hard to extend. Further, in this day and age is pratically used only by the FOSS community and the “darknet” drug dealers. All of the above, set GPG in an unfortunate spot, where it seems it will be replace any other day. Yet, the biggest problem of GPG is not either its codebase, nor its low usage and for this reason I think it will (sadly) remain around for quite a bit. Maybe I will discuss more on this later topic in another thread. ...

3 May 2020 · 5 min · 931 words · Jacopo Scannella

Win Run Aliases

Today I was looking for a simple and efficient way to add aliases to the Windows Run dialog box (the one you can open using Win+R). Turns out my preferred way to do so is editing the registry, adding a key under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths ending with .exe. The Default value represents the exe you want to run, you can also add a subkey string value to the key with the name Path to specify the path where you want to run your alias. ...

20 March 2019 · 1 min · 123 words · Jacopo Scannella