Trivia due by 11:59pm, Monday, February 13.
Full assignment due by 11:59pm, Monday, February 20.
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 standard input. 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 group 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!
The managing TA for this assignment is Samuel Atlas (Samuel.Atlas@rochester.edu). Please direct your questions about this assignment to the TA who knows more about the assignment setup than the instructor does. The TA's office hours for this assignment are:
You can form a group of two for this assignment. You can also choose to work alone. You will be able to choose to work in a group of two for five assignments (assignments #2/#3/#4/#5/#6). It is our policy that you can NOT work with the same team partner for more than three assignments. If you do, we will apply 50% penalty on your fourth and fifth assignments with the same grouping.
Each group of students will attempt to defuse their own personalized bomb. Each bomb is a Linux binary executable file that has been compiled from a C program. To obtain your group's bomb, do the following from a URCS machine (it won't work from your dorm or any other place out of the URCS network). One (and only one) of the group members should point your Web browser to the bomb request daemon at:
http://cycle1.csug.rochester.edu:15213
Fill out the HTML form with the email addresses and names of your team
members, and then submit the form by clicking the "Submit" button. The
request daemon will build your bomb and return it immediately to your
browser in a tar file called bombk.tar, where k is the unique
number of your bomb.
Save the bombk.tar file to a (protected) directory in which
you plan to do your work. Then give the command: tar -xvf bombk.tar.
This will create 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.
If you make any kind of mistake requesting a bomb (such as neglecting to save it, or typing the wrong group members), simply request another. If you change groups, again, request another bomb; we'll sort out the duplicate assignments when we do the grading.
Once you have received your bomb from the bomb daemon, save it in a secure directory. Your job is to defuse the bomb.
The bombs are limited to run on the cs undergraduate network only. We have tried to enable all machines on the undergraduate network, but machines come and go. If your machine doesn't want to run the bomb executable, ssh to one of the cycle servers (cycle1, cycle2, cycle3.csug.rochester.edu) and run it there. Contact the TA with any problems related to this issue.
You can use many tools to help you with this; 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 TA, and you lose 1/4 point (up to a max of 10 points) in the final score for the lab. So there are consequences to exploding the bomb. You must be careful!
Each phase is worth 10 points, for a total of 60 points.
The phases get progressively harder to defuse, but 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 the bomb with a
command line argument such as bomb_codes, it will read the
input lines from bomb_codes until it reaches EOF, and then
switch over to standard input. 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 memory. 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 in the rest of your career.
By Monday, Feb. 13, send email to TA Samuel Atlas with the subject line "[CSC252] Assign#2 Trivia - uname1 uname2" (without the quotes, where uname is your login name) containing answers to the following questions (a single email per team is expected):
gdb, how do you print a string whose base address
is stored in the register eax? (Hint: Something
similar to C.)
There are many ways to go about 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 is not always easy to do. You can 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:
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.
gdbgdb.
gdb.
Click here
to access these resources.
gdb command
prompt, or type "man gdb", "info gdb", or "xinfo gdb" at a Unix
prompt.
You can even run gdb itself under gdb-mode in
emacs.
objdump -tobjdump -dstrings
Looking for a particular tool? Don't forget, the commands
man and apropos are your friends. In particular,
man ascii might come in useful. The web may also be a
treasure trove of information. If you get stumped, feel free to ask the TA
for help.
There is no explicit turn-in. The bomb will notify us automatically after you have successfully defused it. You can keep track of how you (and the other groups) are doing by looking at the score board. This web page is updated continuously to show the progress of each group.
Late turn-ins will be accepted for up to three days, with 10% penalty for each late day. Note that the score board will not reflect the late penalty, which we will manually apply after the assignment closes. No turn-ins more than three-day late will be accepted.