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Dreaming in Reverse Engineering

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That routinely happens to me too -- finding solutions in the morning of the next day (revelation typically comes while I am in the shower), after having banged my head at the problem for several days before.

Putting the subconscious to work... I read somewhere that his is how it has to be done -- "stimulate" it hard enough first, then "disconnect" and let it run free-wheeled.

Does anyone have any particular tricks and hints to improve this process?

Exactly the same here. It's 4:16am right now and I just fixed a problem in my code that seemed baffling last night. I used to try and push myself to finish things at night but have come to realize that most of the real thinking happens in the unconscious. Reading Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" really changed my view of the power of the unconscious.

Not for sleeping hours but I've discovered that going for a run is a boost of creativity. And related to this, I would say that any automated task that you can do almost with your eyes closed, without paying attention, free your mind enough to see things from totally different perspectives.

Totally agree (swimming and running in my case), but this leads us to the next very controversial question -- how much our free time off the job during the day, impacts our results on the job (so shouldn't we have more of it)? I know I am not creative past 6-7 hours a day at work.

This question is of course applicable only to people in positions where creativity is heavily involved in producing the value.

I've heard this described as focused vs diffuse mode thinking. Focus on a problem for some time then move on to something else to allow the diffuse mode to continue the work.

Salvador Dali used this method by sitting in a chair while holding a key in his hand. He would then try to nap in that position. When the key would fall from his hand onto a plate he put next to the chair, the sound would wake him up and he would often have fresh ideas about his problem.

I played the game another way, without reverse engineering but with execution tricks:

> https://gist.github.com/kpouget/d13b6328dd6ad8489affb3d24ad8...

1/ a simple GDB.py trick: `make debug` (passme.py ) 2/ a not-so-easy-in-the-end LD_PRELOAD trick: `make run` (passme.c)

Mind asking a few things? What's the purpose of this line

  void *call_addr = (void *)CHECKSUM_CALL_ADDR;

to then casting the rvalue to a double void pointer here:

  void **target = (void **)CHECKSUM_CALL_ADDR;

(why not just void*) ? Also, even though mprotect() succeeds, I got a segfault.

> Mind asking a few things?

sure! nothing and nothing ;-) they were just leads I was trying. `target` was for:

    void **target; *target = *mov_addr; // move sizeof((void *) bits

I've updated the gist.

> Also, even though mprotect() succeeds, I got a segfault.

try in GDB something like:

    (gdb) disassemble main
    ...
    0x00000000004005dd <+64>:	mov    %rax,%rdi
    0x00000000004005e0 <+67>:	callq  0x400566 <checksum>
    0x00000000004005e5 <+72>:	mov    %rax,-0x8(%rbp)
    0x00000000004005e9 <+76>:	cmpq   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)
    ....
    (gdb) break passme.c:62
    (gdb) continue # should ends up *after* the memcpy
    (gdb) disassemble main
    ...
    0x00000000004005dd <+64>:	mov    %rax,%rdi
    0x00000000004005e0 <+67>:	movl   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)
    0x00000000004005e7 <+74>:	nop
    0x00000000004005e8 <+75>:	nop
    0x00000000004005e9 <+76>:	cmpq   $0xad4,-0x8(%rbp)

and in both disassemblies, look around 0x4005e0 (<main+67>) to see how instructions have been overwritten. In the second disassembly, if you see strange-looking instructions (eg clc), there was a problem with the copy / the instruction copied. Let me know !

Ray Kurzweil also talks about routinely using sleep and dreams to gain new perspective to difficult problems:

http://www.afb.org/info/living-with-vision-loss/using-techno...

This was a fun puzzle and learning challenge. Glad to see the next generation is still suffering with null terminators :)

That happenned to me aswell all through university!

I found that sometimes while debugging something, we go very deep into the problem and trying to understand every little details. Sleep helps get your mind back on the original issue and look at it from another perspective, in a more relaxed way.

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