The world of binary exploitation is low level, but fun. Up until now I have only worked with 32-bit programs, so I decided to work through the 64-bit Exploit Education Phoenix (formerly Protostar) set of levels for a different challenge. The source code is available in each level’s section online.

Setup

I won’t go over installing QEMU, as OS-specific installation is available on their website. I am working on a Linux machine, your setup process may differ on a different operating system.

For Linux, download the AMD64 Qcow2 QEMU image archive and extract it. Inside there is a boot script, simply chmod +x and run it. The VM will start up with SSH open over port 2222. Connect with:

$ ssh -p2222 user@localhost

Default credentials are user:user for user account and root:root for root account.

Tools

I will use my local machine for writing exploits using pwntools. A nice tutorial covering all the basics is available here. The VM itself comes with GEF, an extension for GDB which makes debugging and exploitation a much more intuiative experience.

Phoenix - Stack

My writeup on the first set of challenges can be found here.