PicoCTF Challenge: GDB Baby Step1

August 06, 2025 PicoCTF Medium

Challenge Overview:

  • The following was the description for the challenge: stepic challenge

Deep dive

  • The approach is very straight forward stepic challenge
    • The approach is kinda always the same.
    • Whenever you get a binary, you have to make it executeable, otherwise you won’t be able to run.
  • Starting GDB stepic challenge
    • This step was unncessary but it always important to understand the behaviour of the program. You have to run it and see the output, and in our case, when we try to run the binary it just exits.
    • Futhermore we see that by using the ltrace command, which is very useful as well. It also tells us that the program just exits.
  • Following the instructions from the description: stepic challenge
    • Python script? 
        python3 -c "print(int('0x86342',16))"
    • Takes the hex and converts it to a decimal. The 16 represent hex
    • -c allows us to execute python from the terminal.