Exploiting Format Strings in Windows

Osanda Malith Jayathissa
Feb 3 · 8 min read

I thought of making a small challenge in exploiting format strings in Windows. This is how it looks, it asks for a filename to open. At first, this might be a bit confusing. There are no vulnerable functions in reading a file. You can see that our first argument to the program is echoed back in the program.

Let’s investigate this inside a debugger. As you can see if argc == 2 the application…

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Osanda Malith Jayathissa

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Security Researcher — https://osandamalith.com ☕ Support me by buying me a Coffee 💖— https://buymeacoff.ee/osandamalith

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