Cyber Security Academy · Lesson

Reversing and Pwn Basics

Intro to reverse engineering and binary exploitation.

Reversing and Pwn at a Glance

Two closely related CTF categories deal with compiled programs:

Reverse engineering (rev) — you analyze a binary to understand what it does, often to recover a password check or hidden logic that prints the flag.
Pwn (binary exploitation) — you find a memory-safety bug in a running binary and exploit it to hijack execution, frequently to spawn a shell on a remote service holding the flag.

Rev is about understanding; pwn is about breaking. Both require comfort with low-level concepts.

First Look at a Binary

Never open a binary blind in a disassembler. Triage it first with quick command-line tools to learn its type, architecture, and any obvious strings.

# Identify file type and architecture
file ./challenge

# Pull human-readable strings (flags are sometimes left in plaintext)
strings ./challenge

# Check which security mitigations are enabled
checksec --file=./challenge

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