Anatomy of a Failed (Nation-State?) Attack
Disclosures
🧠This post is fully human-written: all prose with the exception of the IoC information. Because it was time-sensitive, Claude was used to accelerate the RAT analysis and build an IoC-detection script.
As I live in Canada, this information was reported to the appropriate Canadian agencies (CCCS et al). The payload-laden image does not trigger any AV engines on VirusTotal.
There Is Life Before Main in Rust
Disclosures
🧠This post is 100% human-written. Claude was used for feedback and to assist with the linker symbol diagram. Cursor was used for feedback and to ensure examples were compilable.
The author of this post is deeply interested in the topic of life-before-main: he is the author of the ctor crate, and the creator of the linktime project that we’ll be using in the examples below.
Deriving a Bit-Twiddling Hack: Signed Integer Overflow
As a thin layer on top of assembly language, C’s integer arithmetic APIs have always been minimal, effectively just mapping the underlying assembly opcodes to the C arithmetic operators. In addition, while unsigned arithmetic can safely overflow in C, signed arithmetic overflow is considered undefined behaviour, and UB can end up in heartache for C developers.
Bootstrapping a language
I was hoping to make more progress on self-hosting my scripting language (Kalos) this week, but I’m running out of steam because I think I coded myself into a corner. This is not a post where I’ve got everything figured out, but instead I’m taking a few moments to re-hash where things are at and figure out a plan for the future.
Hacking Bluetooth to Brew Coffee from GitHub Actions: Part 3 - GitHub Actions
This is the last part of a three-part series covering the odyssey of getting a new coffeemaker, learning BTLE and how it works, reverse-engineering the Bluetooth interface and Android applications for the coffeemaker, writing a Rust-based CLI interface, and finally, hooking it all up to a GitHub actions bot that lets you brew a coffee just by filing an issue!
In part 2 we got the command-line application working, and now it’s time to connect the dots and build a secure, yet web-accessible interface.