Reverse Engineering Shenanigans

Full disclaimer: I have submitted a whopping two pull requests that have yet to be approved/reviewed. With that being said, I am far from an expert but I think that's exactly what qualifies me to make this post. I still feel extremely intimidated to make changes to the code. I don't really know what I'm doing but I'm figuring it out and so can you. If you're reading this, I'm not far from where you are. I have wanted to contribute to open source projects for a long time but never had the courage to take the leap. Everything about the process just seemed overwhelming. A lot of the advice on the internet made it seem so easy. Just pick a project you already use and and find a "good first issue" and make the pull request. Well... sure but when the code base is massive, what do you do? How do you even go about trying to tackle even the simplest of tasks. It feels like everyone else is a master programmer and you're just a scrub. My first piece of advic...

Download here:  https://crackmes.one/crackme/68fce1922d267f28f69b783a MD5: d984f4a4bbb82a815f0c16f55335db9a SHA1: 01b8463234e66e91c96052414eaff8dd7053cd99 SHA256: 104f850cf4e7d3f6bc09d286fcbe651795c632a79ebbc2242ea8be08cd8b8e41 This is listed as an x86 Assembler executable with a difficulty rating of 3.0. The author is FentCat and the executable is written for Windows. The authors description:  Hello, this is my first ever upload. Please give me feedback. Was made in Assembler using nasm. have a great day Loading this executable in Detect it Easy, it appears to be extremely complex but after loading it into Ghidra, you realize that you have a plethora of information available to you. Below is the output and the only variable I named was the return result of validate_password and the g_ variables.   At first I thought maybe the author was trying to fool me into not checking those fake function calls but they are legit fake calls. As you can see below, the call just sets a...

Download here:  https://crackmes.one/crackme/68baa4348fac2855fe6fbb18 MD5: bb20f4ae2a79145210d164691ac7a481 SHA1: c13928fc9e65b37a6debd67e3f398614943e9fa4 SHA256: 72cfda0045fdf90e5a7965dd76690bba473e4dd87c86ff11a46704f1930d9ff7  This is listed as a C/C++ x64 executable with a difficulty rating of 2.0. The author is duckzzy and the executable is written for Windows. The authors description: Good luck! :)   I decided to tackle this keygenme today to hopefully help someone out. In the crackmes.one discord server, a user by the name of British_UK was having some issues solving this challenge so I thought I'd give it a shot.   So without further-ado, lets get this loaded in DIE and see what we can learn. First thing that jumps out at me is the high number of sections. Das weird. Its doesn't appear to be packed though. Finally, it is a console application.   The strings don't appear to be encoded/encrypted/obfuscated/choose latest buzzword here. It appears as though ...

EDIT (11/08/2025)   Download here:  https://crackmes.one/crackme/68bd2491224c0ec5dcedbde9 It's been a few days since I made a post. Suffice it to say, I did not succeed in my goal of posting every day of October but that's okay. I'm going to continue doing my best to post as frequently as possible. Today, I was looking for a challenge and stumbled on ryanmerket's Hacker's Edge Book CrackMe v3. It is described as a C/C++ x64 executable written for Windows with a difficulty rating of 3.7. It's meant to promote the authors new book and after reading through the landing page, I can't wait to get my hands on it. It was only published last month!! Test your skills and see if you can solve it... even if you're unsuccessful, you might still get a prize ;) I got into reverse engineering to cheat in video games... and to impress the ladies (obviously). I never imagined it would ever get me anything. Even though it is only a book, it's proof that if I stick wit...

Download here: https://crackmes.one/crackme/68e6377b2d267f28f69b7447 MD5: 406af7cd43808f1de221d36d8c7d12d6 SHA1:  736c3fee49a93c60731a2f137545b75311646f9f SHA256: 588211672f26f28731da0d30f2691f23542ea7a825f553a5edc9087dbf52b86e This is listed as a C/C++ x64 executable with a difficulty rating of 3.0. The author is antilagvip and the executable is written for Windows.   The authors description: the right key get the code.. sounds simple right?   This was a fun challenge. I went through the motions. I loaded this in Detect it Easy. It isn't packed. It's a console application. Strings aren't encoded/encrypted. I also loaded it into PE Bear and just looked around. Nothing interesting jumped out at me.   I've talked about how to find the main function in previous posts so I'm just going jump in and say that it is located at 0x140001180. Pretty basic stuff, it prompts you for a key and waits for input. It calls a function that validates whether your key is valid and ...

Download here: https://crackmes.one/crackme/68e2b4652d267f28f69b738e MD5: 49c66031be227cc5982daadfd7368e9d SHA1: 0f01dfd5c1775dd7b605c992903d67bbafa3051f SHA256: 67b06c9c003f0c26c319d82b1fc6436207eaf0e3ed31f438312be8349225272f This is listed as a C/C++ x64 executable with a difficulty rating of 2.5. The author is git and the executable is written for Windows. The authors description: medium-hard crackme with antidebug checks obfuscated strings and key With this crack me, I'm going to take a bit of a different approach. I'm not going to use a decompiler. Taking a look at the strings, I can see some base64 encoded strings. Other than that, Detect it Easy believes this was compiled using Visual Studio 2022 as a console application. It does not appear to be packed. IDA shows us a long series of various debugger checks. At this point, I will manually step through the code and navigate the executable to the good boy. The base64 decode function takes the encoded string and a buffer a...