Fatal Core Dump Game

2 days ago

The author created an educational murder mystery game centered around debugging a core dump as the main evidence.
The game is set in a sci-fi environment with an airlock door controller at the center of the mystery.
The murder involves exploiting a buffer overflow to trigger the airlock, combining software negligence with clever exploitation.
The author wrote a minimal C library for the airlock controller to ensure realism and avoid designing purely for puzzles.
A custom binary protocol was developed for inter-device communication, though it added unnecessary complexity.
The exploit involves corrupting a callback pointer on the heap to execute attack code stored on the stack.
Compiler flags and environment settings were adjusted to simplify the exploit's execution and memory layout consistency.
An RPG Maker simulation was created to visually illustrate the murder sequence, despite the tool's learning curve.
The game includes a web-based GDB environment for solving the puzzle entirely in the browser.
The project involved generating logs and core dumps consistently using Docker containers for reproducibility.

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