Computer System Organization Lab

Assignment: Defusing a Binary Bomb

Due: Nov. 14, 11:55 pm
Introduction
The nefarious Dr. Evil has planted a slew of “binary bombs” on our machines. A binary bomb is a program
that consists of a sequence of phases. Each phase expects you to type a particular string on stdin. If you type
the correct string, then the phase is defused and the bomb proceeds to the next phase. Otherwise, the bomb
explodes by printing "BOOM!!!" and then terminating. The bomb is defused when every phase has been
defused.
There are too many bombs for us to deal with, so we are giving each student a bomb to defuse. Your mission,
which you have no choice but to accept, is to defuse your bomb before the due date. Good luck, and welcome
to the bomb squad!

Preparation:
In order to complete this lab, you have to download a VM and run it on Oracle VirtualBox. The Bomb will
explode if you try to run it on a machine other than the provided VM.
• The VM machine image can be downloaded from the following URL:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QLhvcIoK5nrkv40PnfHBb1ZKcPlNibBG
• Oracle VirtualBox can be downloaded from the following URL:
https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads
Download and install the suitable version of VirtualBox for your operating system.
After installation of the VirtualBox, you can import the VM intro VirtualBox by choosing File->
Import Appliance option. The user-id for the VM is “user” and the password is also “user”. The VM
has been configured to log in automatically.
For better performance, it is recommended to use the “Scaled Mode” view for the VirtualBox. It has
been observed that resizing the window or changing the screen resolution may decrease the
performance of the virtual machine. VirtualBox Extension Pack 6.1.10 is already installed on the
virtual machine, however, it is recommended to update VirtualBox Extension Pack.
• Students with M1 and M2 chips-based Notebooks should connect to a remote Linux Server via ssh to
defuse the binary bombs:
ssh [email protected] -p 4410

Step 1: Get Your Bomb

You can obtain your bomb from the following URL:
http://dclap-v1111-csd.abudhabi.nyu.edu:15213/
(Note: You need an active VPN connection to NYU networks to access this URL from outside.)
This will display a binary bomb request form for you to fill in. Enter your username (netID) and email address
and hit the Submit button. The server will build your unique bomb and return it to your browser in a tar file
called bombk.tar, where k is the unique number of your bomb.
Students who are using a remote Linux Server can use the following command which will launch a text-
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based browser (lynx) to download the binary bombs.
lynx http://dclap-v1111-csd.abudhabi.nyu.edu:15213/
Save the bombk.tar file to a directory in which you plan to do your work. Then give the command: tar -xvf
bombk.tar. This will extract the binary bomb into a directory called bombk with the following files:
• README: Identifies the bomb and its owners.
• bomb: The executable binary bomb.
• bomb.c: Source file with the bomb’s main routine and a friendly greeting from Dr. Evil.
If for some reason you request multiple bombs, this is not a problem. Choose one bomb to work on and delete
the rest.

Step 2: Defuse Your Bomb

Your job for this lab is to defuse your bomb.
You must do the assignment on the provided VM. In fact, there is a rumor that Dr. Evil really is evil, and the
bomb will always blow up if run elsewhere. There are several other tamper-proofing devices built into the
bomb as well, or so we hear.
You can use many tools to help you defuse your bomb. Please look at the hints section for some tips and ideas.
The best way is to use your favorite debugger to step through the disassembled binary.
Each time your bomb explodes it notifies the bomblab server, and you lose 1/2 point (up to a max of 20 points)
in the final score for the lab. So, there are consequences to exploding the bomb. You must be careful!
The first four phases are worth 10 points each. Phases 5 and 6 are a little more difficult, so they are worth 15
points each. So the maximum score you can get is 70 points.
Although phases get progressively harder to defuse, the expertise you gain as you move from phase to phase
should offset this difficulty. However, the last phase will challenge even the best students, so please don’t
wait until the last minute to start.
The bomb ignores blank input lines. If you run your bomb with a command line argument, for example:
linux> ./bomb psol.txt
then it will read the input lines from psol.txt until it reaches EOF (end of file), and then switch over to stdin.
In a moment of weakness, Dr. Evil added this feature, so you don’t have to keep retyping the solutions to
phases you have already defused.
To avoid accidentally detonating the bomb, you will need to learn how to single-step through the assembly
code and how to set breakpoints. You will also need to learn how to inspect both the registers and the memory
states. One of the nice side-effects of doing the lab is that you will get very good at using a debugger. This
is a crucial skill that will pay big dividends the rest of your career.

Logistics
This is an individual project. All hand-ins are electronic. Clarifications and corrections will be posted on
NYU Brightspace.

Hand-in
Please Submit your BombID and solutions for each phase in a single text file to Brightspace. The bomb will
notify your instructor automatically about your progress as you work on it. You can keep track of how you
are doing by looking at the class scoreboard at:
http://DCLAP-V1111-CSD.ABUDHABI.NYU.EDU:15213/scoreboard
This web page is updated automatically after every few seconds to show the progress of each bomb.

Hints (Please read this!)

There are many ways of defusing your bomb. You can examine it in great detail without ever running the
program and figure out exactly what it does. This is a useful technique, but it not always easy to do. You can
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also run it under a debugger, watch what it does step by step, and use this information to defuse it. This is
probably the fastest way of defusing it.
We do make one request, please do not use brute force! You could write a program that will try every possible
key to find the right one. But this is no good for several reasons:
• You lose 1/2 point (up to a max of 20 points) every time you guess incorrectly, and the bomb
explodes.

• Every time you guess wrong, a message is sent to the bomblab server. You could very quickly saturate
the network with these messages and cause the system administrators to revoke your computer access.

• We haven’t told you how long the strings are, nor have we told you what characters are in them. Even
if you made the (incorrect) assumptions that they all are less than 80 characters long and only contain
letters, then you will have 2680 guesses for each phase. This will take a very long time to run, and
you will not get the answer before the assignment is due.

There are many tools which are designed to help you figure out both how programs work, and what is wrong
when they don’t work. Here is a list of some of the tools you may find useful in analyzing your bomb, and
hints on how to use them.
• gdb
The GNU debugger is a command-line debugger tool available on virtually every platform. You can
trace through a program line by line, examine memory and registers, look at both the source code and
assembly code (we are not giving you the source code for most of your bomb), set breakpoints, set
memory watch points, and write scripts.
The file GDB-CheatSheet.pdf also posted with the assignment has a very handy single-page gdb
summary that you can print out and use as a reference. Here are some other tips for using gdb.
– To keep the bomb from blowing up every time you type in a wrong input, you’ll want to learn
how to set breakpoints.
– For online documentation, type “help” at the gdb command prompt, or type “man gdb”, or
“info gdb” at a Unix prompt. Some people also like to run gdb under gdb-mode in emacs.
• objdump -t
This will print out the bomb’s symbol table. The symbol table includes the names of all functions and
global variables in the bomb, the names of all the functions the bomb calls, and their addresses. You
may learn something by looking at the function names!
• objdump -d
Use this to disassemble all of the code in the bomb. You can also just look at individual functions.
Reading the assembler code can tell you how the bomb works.
Although objdump -d gives you a lot of information, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. Calls to
system-level functions are displayed in a cryptic form. For example, a call to sscanf might appear as:
8048c36: e8 99 fc ff ff call 80488d4 <_init+0x1a0>
To determine that the call was to sscanf, you would need to disassemble within gdb.

• strings
This utility will display the printable strings in your bomb.

Looking for a particular tool? How about documentation? Don’t forget, the commands apropos, man, and
info are your friends. In particular, man ascii might come in useful. info gas will give you more than you
ever wanted to know about the GNU Assembler. Also, the web may also be a treasure trove of information.
If you get stumped, feel free to ask your instructor for help.