Motivation​

If you're like me, you try and keep all of your coding-based clutter on a virtual machine. Which usually works great. You can maintain a clean OS, separate work from pleasure, and quickly return to a snapshot if something goes terribly wrong. But when I tried doing development for Android from a virtual machine, I quickly arrived at an unexpected hurdle.

If you try and run Android Studio's emulators, you'll quickly be reminded that you can't simply run a virtual machine inside a virtual machine. You technically can, if you enable Nested VT-x/AMD-V, but even if you succeed navigating the hell of starting an AVD android emulator from inside your VM, you'd be met by the huge performance hit of running nested virtualisation.

You can instead consider running either the Genymotion emulator or Xamarin Android Player, which both use Oracle's VirtualBox to run their emulators. But instead of running them inside your VM (and being met with the issue of nested virtualisation), you can run these emulators on your host OS. Since both of these use VirtualBox, you can take full use of the networking aspect of VMs to connect your development VM to your Android emulator VM!

Setup​

I'm assuming you've already

1. Downloaded and installed VirtualBox
2. Set up a development VM inside of VirtualBox
3. Connected your dev VM to the outside world using either NAT or Bridged networking (I personally use bridged, since it helps me to easier access any web dev instances running in the VM)

Creating a virtual device​

Alrighty, now we can download and install either Genymotion emulator or Xamarin Android Player on your host OS.

After you've done that, you can start up your software, and set up a virtual device (phone) by following the instructions.

Now we need to do some configuration work inside VirtualBox.

Configuring the virtual mobile device​

If you open up VirtualBox, you'll see that the newly created virtual mobile device is listed in the list of machines.

We need to edit the network settings for the mobile device. It will need two adapters. One is to connect to the network of the development machine (NAT or Bridged). In my case the machines are in a bridged network, which makes it easier to access from the host OS, as well as between each-other.

The other, arguably more important adapter to add/enable is the Host-only Adapter. This is the one adb will connect over.

Make note of the adapter name here!

VirtualBox has the habit of creating multiple host-only adapters, so this name is very important to make note of.

Configuring the development VM​

Now that we have set the mobile device settings up, we need to mirror them in the develpment VM. If you've used NAT for the mobile device, redo the settings in the development one. If you've put it into a bridged network, do the same to the dev VM.

After this, we need to add a Host-only Adapter to the dev VM. Did you take note of the Adapter name from the mobile machine? This is where you use it!

Starting up the machines​

Normally, you just start them from their respective applications. Start the mobile machine from Xamarin or Genymotion, and start your dev VM from VirtualBox.

But I've found that if I start the mobile machine from Genymotion, it tends to reset the Host-only Adapter name, add a new one, and fail to start. So, if this happens to you, this is what I do:

1. Start the mobile machine from VirtualBox. A command-line terminal will pop up, and will start loading.
2. When it appears that the terminal isn't doing anything anymore, you can safely start the mobile device from Genymotion.

This is how my terminal looks when it stops loading. At this stage, I start the device from Genymotion as normal.

If you haven't already, you can now start your development VM as well.

Connecting to the mobile device​

In this scenario, we are going to use adb to connect to the mobile device from the dev VM. All we need is the IP that the device is running on. Both Genymotion and Xamarin provide some way to see the IP.

But if you're having trouble to find it, you can go to VirtualBox, and see the IP from the terminal we saw earlier.

So, now we can easily connect from our dev VM using the command-line tool adb

kblagoev@deva:~/Android/Sdk/platform-tools$ ./adb connect 192.168.68.101
* daemon not running; starting now at tcp:5037
* daemon started successfully
connected to 192.168.68.101:5555
kblagoev@deva:~/Android/Sdk/platform-tools$ 

Success!​

And since I've used a bridged network, I can also easily do network connections between the two devices, which can be quite useful in some cases. So I recommend it, unless you have your own way of doing it.

Now you can develop! Have fun!

Thank you for reading!

The information in this blog, as well as all the tools, apps and libraries I develop are currently open source.

I would love to keep it this way, and you can help!

You can buy me a coffee from here, which will go towards the next all-nighter I pull off!

Or you can support me and my code monthly over at Github Sponsors!

Thanks!

Reading is an integral part of writing.

There are many ways this statement can be phrased, but it carries the message accross. Before creating something new and original, we need to have information in the context of the thing we're trying to create.

This is a writeup for the Key Mission challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Forensics.

Prompt​

The secretary of earth defense has been kidnapped. We have sent our elite team on the enemy's base to find his location. Our team only managed to intercept this traffic. Your mission is to retrieve secretary's hidden location.

This is a writeup for the Input as a Service challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Misc.

Prompt​

In order to blend with the extraterrestrials, we need to talk and sound like them. Try some phrases in order to check if you can make them believe you are one of them.

This is a writeup for the BlitzProp challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Web.

Prompt​

A tribute page for the legendary alien band called BlitzProp!

This is a writeup for the CaaS challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Web.

Prompt​

cURL As A Service or CAAS is a brand new Alien application, built so that humans can test the status of their websites. However, it seems that the Aliens have not quite got the hang of Human programming and the application is riddled with issues.

Well, here we go. This was the very first CTF event that I took part of while it was happening, and I'm quite proud of my results!

Most importantly, almost every challenge that I finished taught me a bunch of new concepts and techniques, and showcased what can be expected in the field of hunting vulnerabilities.

By the end of the 5-day ordeal I got to 357th place out of 4740 teams and more than 9500 players, and I'm very satisfied with such an outcome from my very first event of this type.

But, as I can now see, the learning process continues even after the event, in the form of writing write-ups! The much more level-headed approach of trying to explain and follow the process of finding the flags means that I get to see my ideas and techniques in a new light, and organise the tools and concepts much better.

Reading write-ups is also indisplensable, as there were quite a few other challenges that I was sure I was very near to solving, but never found out what I was missing. Reading other people's write-ups allowed me to see what I was did right or wrong, and how to improve on that.

So I hope you get that from reading these write-ups as well, and learn a few things from them, or at least see an another approach to solving the same problem.

Enjoy!

Category Web​

Inspector Gadget - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

An easy warm-up challenge in the style of a scavenger hunt

CaaS - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Exploiting curl running locally on the host, to get local file inclusion

miniSTRypalace - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Showcasing the importance of white-listing instead of black-listing commands and strings inside PHP

BlitzProp - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Exploring the interesting concept ot AST injection and prototype pollution, resulting in remote code exectution. And all of that because we use the wrong version of a library in node

E.Tree - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Blind XPATH injection with a slight twist

Wild goose hunt - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A challenge showcasing the weakness of improper handling of mongo queries

Emoji Voting - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

This fun challenge showcases blind SQL injection inside of an ORDER BY clause

Category Reverse​

Passphrase - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A simple reverse-engineering challenge invoving stringcompare

Authenticator - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Reverse-engineering a binary, involving both stringcompare and a bit of XOR magic

Category Forensics​

Key Mission - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Having fun with USB Human Interface Devices, namely a keyboard. The twist was having to deal with the Shift key

Category Crypto​

Nintendo Base64 - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

An easy warm-up cryptography challenge, dealing with multilayered base64 encoding and obfuscation

Soulcrabber - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A challenge written in Rust, showcasing using known seeds for pseudo-random number generators

Phasestream 1- Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

The first challenge of this series showcased XOR encryption with a 5-byte key

Phasestream 2 - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

Still on the topic of XOR, this time using a 1-byte key, but hiding the real flag in a list of 9999 different strings

Phasestream 3 - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A challenge showcasing the devastating effects of reusing keystreams in AES encryption

Phasestream 4 - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A direct follow-up of the previous challenge, introducing a bit of a guessing game

Category Misc​

Alien Camp - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

A fun scripting challenge involving the automatic handling of nc based services

Input as a Service - Cyberapocalypse 2021 CTF

input() in python2.x is scary by default

Thank you for reading!

The information in this blog, as well as all the tools, apps and libraries I develop are currently open source.

I would love to keep it this way, and you can help!

You can buy me a coffee from here, which will go towards the next all-nighter I pull off!

Or you can support me and my code monthly over at Github Sponsors!

Thanks!

This is a writeup for the Alien Camp challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Misc.

Prompt​

The Ministry of Galactic Defense now accepts human applicants for their specialised warrior unit, in exchange for their debt to be erased. We do not want to subject our people to this training and to be used as pawns in their little games. We need you to answer 500 of their questions to pass their test and take them down from the inside.

This is a writeup for the Authenticator challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Reverse.

Prompt​

We managed to steal one of the extraterrestrials' authenticator device. If we manage to understand how it works and get their credentials, we may be able to bypass all of their security locked doors and gain access everywhere!

This is a writeup for the Passphrase challenge, part of the Hack the box's Cyberapocalypse CTF 2021, category Reverse.

Prompt​

You found one of their space suits forgotten in a room. You wear it, but before you go away, a guard stops you and asks some questions.