Knowledge

Structured technical notes and foundational knowledge for CTF and security research. This section covers attack primitives, cryptographic concepts, exploitation techniques, and mental models used in practice.

Cryptography

• Block Ciphers
  • AES modes of operation and their security properties
  • Padding oracle attacks and CBC bit-flipping
  • ECB pattern analysis
• Public Key Cryptography
  • RSA common attacks: small exponent, Wiener, Coppersmith
  • Elliptic curve cryptography fundamentals
  • Discrete logarithm problems
• Hash Functions
  • Length extension attacks
  • Collision resistance and birthday paradox
  • HMAC construction and timing attacks

Exploitation Primitives

• Memory Corruption
  • Stack buffer overflows and ROP chains
  • Heap exploitation: use-after-free, double-free, heap spray
  • Format string vulnerabilities
• Web Exploitation
  • SQL injection: union-based, blind, time-based
  • XSS: reflected, stored, DOM-based
  • CSRF and SSRF attack vectors
  • Template injection: SSTI, JWT manipulation
• Protocol Analysis
  • HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 security considerations
  • DNS rebinding and subdomain takeover
  • WebSocket security issues

Reverse Engineering

• Static Analysis
  • Control flow graph construction
  • Symbolic execution basics
  • Decompiler limitations and workarounds
• Dynamic Analysis
  • Debugging techniques and breakpoint strategies
  • Fuzzing: coverage-guided, grammar-based
  • Binary instrumentation for analysis

System Security

• Operating Systems
  • Linux kernel exploitation vectors
  • Windows privilege escalation paths
  • Container escape techniques
• Network Security
  • TCP/IP stack vulnerabilities
  • DNS security and cache poisoning
  • TLS/SSL protocol analysis