42-binary-security

1. Intro

This repository groups several 42 school curriculum projects in binary analysis, reverse engineering, and low-level Linux security. The material is educational and lab-oriented: structured writeups, recovered context, and small helpers that show how each challenge was approached in a controlled environment—not a claim of professional offensive-security experience.

Example challenge environment and binary protection context from the OverRide track.

2. What this repository covers

Across the three projects, the common threads are:

• Linux privilege escalation and trust boundaries (permissions, SUID, cron, services)
• Binary analysis and reverse engineering (static reading, disassembly/decompiler use, reasoning about control flow)
• Memory-corruption exploitation on the stack and heap, including format-string abuse where it appears in the levels
• Shellcode and payload shaping under layout and syscall constraints (including environment placement and NOP sleds where relevant)
• Debugger-assisted analysis (gdb and related workflows)
• Low-level security reasoning: tracing how a program checks input, where assumptions break, and how mitigations or quirks change the exploit path

3. Projects

Project	Focus	What it demonstrates
snowcrash	Privilege escalation, Linux trust boundaries, SUID/cron/service paths, debugger-assisted bypasses	Structured level writeups: binary/script recon, local misconfiguration and injection patterns, gdb-oriented bypasses
rainfall	Binary exploitation: stack / heap / format-string, shellcode, payload construction	Documented progression (levels + bonuses): memory corruption, format strings (incl. GOT), shellcode delivery, heap/C++ cases, integer/logic pitfalls
override	Advanced binary exploitation: ret2libc, format-string leaks and writes, ptrace constraints, integer tricks	Per-level analysis: static/dynamic work, shellcode under syscall monitoring, ret2libc and format abuse, application-level tricks (x86 → x86-64)

4. Repository structure

42-binary-security/
├── snowcrash/    # privilege escalation track (levels + solution.md / artifacts)
├── rainfall/     # binary exploitation track (levels + resources/, tools/)
└── override/     # binary exploitation track (levels + solution.md / artifacts)

5. Portfolio note

This is educational, lab, and CTF-style work from the 42 curriculum. Challenge secrets and progression artifacts (flags, passwords, and similar tokens) are removed or redacted in this public version so the repo stays a readable portfolio sample without spoiling or leaking challenge material.