Category Archives: Software

Broken love: letting my IDA maintenance period run out next year

With IDA 9.0 Hex-Rays says they are switching to a subscription only model. This was already threatened to existing customers before — roughly two or three years ago — and of course it is being sold with totally great benefits … Continue reading

Posted in EN, Reversing, Software | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Why?

I have written about Microsoft Teams before (in German), how horrible a user experience it is and so on. Let me tell you, it hasn’t gotten any better. Only “newer”. Remember, Microsoft loves Linux now. Right? Or so people, including … Continue reading

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Migrating data from 2 TB SSD to 4 TB SSD with iODD ST400 drive enclosure

Linux is my main system, but I prefer using NTFS for various use cases and in fact some use cases require something like NTFS. The ST400 is the successor of several Zalman-rebranded iODD devices which bring a similar feature set. … Continue reading

Posted in Administration, EN, Linux | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Two more useful flags for cl.exe

/Be appears to spit out a make file snippet that contains the recipe to reproduce a given run of cl.exe. It takes into account variables. Check it out: all: @cd D:\17.7.5\x64 @set INCLUDE= @set LIB= @set LIBPATH= @set CL=/nologo /utf-8 … Continue reading

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(New) shittiest software from Microsoft in my book

Previously the so-called Office and especially Teams were ranking quite high among the shittiest software from Microsoft in my book. In fact Teams in all its incarnations is probably going to take up the four rear slots in my top … Continue reading

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Undocumented MSVC

Some ongoing research. For obvious reasons I can only share results and tools, but not actual sample data.

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Aiding reproducibility in builds with MS Visual C++

<AdditionalOptions>%(AdditionalOptions) /d1trimfile:”$(SolutionDir)\”</AdditionalOptions> In your .vcxproj file or a Directory.Build.props when passed to the compiler (cl.exe, ClCompile) this should trim the leading path used for __FILE__. The backslash is actually required here, because SolutionDir ends in a backslash itself, but we … Continue reading

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Enabling RSA (with SHA-1) again in OpenSSH server

The sshd version that ships with Ubuntu 22.04 seems to have abandoned RSA authentication. Well, that’s not true. It’s about the hash algorithm used by the “old” protocol by the name ssh-rsa, which is deemed insecure by today’s standards. RSA … Continue reading

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IDA and Hex-Rays decompiler keyboard shortcut cheat sheet

Find it on GitHub: assarbad/some-latex/releases/tag/v1.0-ida-cheat-sheet LaTeX source can be found in the repository itself.

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Reminder to self: IDA load all sections

Just a reminder to myself. Edit cfg/pe.cfg inside the IDA installation folder to configure the PE loader to load all sections: // Always load all sections of a PE file? // If no, sections like .reloc and .rsrc are skipped … Continue reading

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ASR rule “Block Win32 API calls from Office macros”

Microsoft says it’s fixed. It may be, but I think there’s more to it than meets the eye. Colleagues of mine noticed that, aside from shortcuts disappearing, Defender also started acting up on TortoiseProc.exe from TortoiseSVN. Notably, checkouts would fail … Continue reading

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dumbin.exe, editbin.exe, lib.exe …

They’re all just slim wrappers around the actual link.exe, not using a common DLL or so, but actually invoking: dumpbin.exe simply invokes “link /dump” and failing that “link.exe link /dump” editbin.exe simply invokes “link /edit” and failing that “link.exe link … Continue reading

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Certum Open Source Code-Signing certificate

In the past I used a variety of code-signing CAs. But for a few years now I am using Certums affordable offer for Open Source developers. Let’s assume you already have their latest hardware and merely want to renew or … Continue reading

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PowerShell

Within the last two years or so I have started to use more and more PowerShell scripting at work and for my private administration tasks on Windows. The thing I find coolest about PowerShell is that you can tap into … Continue reading

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(N)Ostalgie pur für mich

Irgendwann rund um die Wende verbrachte ich als Kind mit meiner Familie das Jahresende auf Usedom in einem alten Ferienheim. Ich könnte heute nicht mehr sagen ob es tatsächlich vor oder nach der Wende war. Jedenfalls gab es dort einen … Continue reading

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FLOSS-Developers gone bonkers?

So as I understand under the hashtag #StandWithUkraine some idiots have started supply-chain attacks, targeting Russian and Belarussian targets. I’ll leave the exercise to find the respective repos on GitHub to the inclined reader. Has everyone gone bonkers now? Aside … Continue reading

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Signing my code from within a (Windows) VM

My main workstation runs Linux. It has for quite some time now. I had some issues getting 3D acceleration passed through using my AMD GPU and VMware Workstation, but finally got it to work. However, this time it’s about signing … Continue reading

Posted in EN, Linux, Software | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Running IDA 7.x/8.x inside Crossover 21/22/24

For a few versions I had issues running IDA Pro in Crossover with IDAPython enabled. Prior to the starting issues, everything worked fine, e.g. in the IDA 6.x version range. Please note that the setup of IDA Pro also succeeded … Continue reading

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Changing local Git clone from master to main

I never understood why Git chose master as the default branch name, MAIN in CVS seemed more sensible, but perhaps Torvald’s animosity towards CVS and SVN plays a role. Presumably trunk in SVN is a reference to the tree-like structure, … Continue reading

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Transition

After more than 17 years — it all started in April 2004 — I am no longer hosting the UltraVNC forum. To the users the only very visible recent change may have been that forum.ultravnc.net now forwards to forum.uvnc.com. The … Continue reading

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