I spent my first month with Ghidra staring at assembly I didn’t understand, convinced I was too stupid for this. Here’s the honest version of how I got from ‘what is a register’ to solving CTF reversing challenges, and the mistakes that cost me weeks.
Some binaries detect that you’re debugging them and crash, change behavior, or hide the flag. This post covers the common anti-debugging techniques and how to bypass them.
Some CTF reversing challenges hide the flag behind a custom virtual machine: a program that interprets its own bytecode. This post shows you how to spot them, reverse the instruction set, and write a solver.
A crackme is a small binary that asks for a password and checks your input. This post walks through solving one, from downloading the binary to extracting the flag, with every tool click explained so you can follow along.
Ghidra’s decompiler turns machine code into something that looks like C. But the output is full of strange variable names, weird casts, and functions that look nothing like what you’d write. Here’s how to read it anyway.