The initial pitch It started as a normal work-day morning, when my friend Alessio comes out of the blue and asked me to play some CTF. "My colleague sent me this VM challenge..." Challenge name: VeryMuch RE Description: Implementing my own VM - Can you check if I did it right? Milestones 15 minutes: player recognizes the implemented virtual machine 30 minutes: (the player) starts writing a disassembler 1 hour: (the player) has the whole program disassembled 1 hour and a half: (the player) understands the logic 2 hours and a half: (the player comes up with a) solution Later in the evening, I picked the challenge up.

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.

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 Some information may be out of date or just incorrect.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.