I don't know where you find candidates that can even approach this level of skill or desire to solve puzzles. Most people I interview struggle with a few lines C program coding.
What kinds of positions are you interviewing for?
I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
31–40 of 309 posts
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#32I don't know where you find candidates that can even approach this level of skill or desire to solve puzzles. Most people I interview struggle with a few lines C program coding.
You could help them find you. I see many people like you lament about not being able to find people with certain skills, but their lamentations provide no information about who they are hiring for or how to contact them. :)
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#33Really nice overview of the process. I was hoping to get into debugging and breaking code, but my career took a wild turn away from that part of the job. It's still something I would like to learn, so I'm reading as much about it as I can. I'm going to take this way off topic here, but it's a curiosity of mine. Please don't take this as an insult; it seems to be very common and as a language learner myself I'm just w…
In Japanese, "、" (読点 tōten) is similar to the English comma; it is used to separately multiple clauses in a sentence. To my understanding, there really aren't grammatical rules for using it like there are in English. In addition, Japanese has no spaces which might lead to some confusion on the how punctuation and spaces are laid out in English. I think the most notable thing from Japanese -> English speakers is the l…
Not to mention the fact that in Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian languages, most punctuation is full-width, with spacing built into the character itself. Compare the English characters (?!.,:) with the Chinese characters （？！。，：）, and you can see how a lot of Asian language learners might just forget to hit the space bar.
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#34> Here is the first thing i typed in the terminal root@lisa:~# ./CrackTheDoor Um. I see at least one security issue already.
kali default user?
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#35I don't know where you find candidates that can even approach this level of skill or desire to solve puzzles. Most people I interview struggle with a few lines C program coding.
Speaking for the security community as someone who's graduating this year, everyone I know who works on CTFs regularly has an astounding level of enthusiasm. It's really a fantastic group of people to be working with.
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#36> Here is the first thing i typed in the terminal root@lisa:~# ./CrackTheDoor Um. I see at least one security issue already.
Could be inside docker. In which case it's all reasonable.
Afraid you're woefully incorrect. The root user is no more contained inside a default docker image than they are inside a chroot, which is, not really at all. It isn't difficult to break out of a container if you have uid 0 aka root. This will change when the userns stuff lands, but it hasn't yet, so that doesn't count yet.
https://opensource.com/business/14/9/security-for-docker
Or as solomon hykes, the docker creator himself said recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7910117
"""When we feel comfortable saying that Docker out-of-the-box can safely contain untrusted uid0 programs, we will say so clearly."""
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#37That's some impressive work. But then... "The company send me another crack me for round 2 :) That's also interesting.." That wasn't enough to get the job?
This is similar to about level 2 or 3, out of 5, of some cracks I've done for security CTF (capture the flag) competitions. Almost every competitive team/individual will solve this pretty easily, and I haven't even been in the elite competitions where it probably gets much harder. So, I would expect there are harder cracks or exploits, if the company wants to hire the best.
By the way, if this sort of thing interests anyone, look into security CTF competitions. You'll probably have to read some tutorials to learn, but CTF's will give the opportunity to apply what you've learned.
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#38I don't know where you find candidates that can even approach this level of skill or desire to solve puzzles. Most people I interview struggle with a few lines C program coding.
I've found that your job post determines the types of candidates you get.
If you describe a really hard programming job, people self select out. If you describe an easy one, everyone applies.
iOS developer? Floodgate.
Crypto expert? Trickle.
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#39Does this guy have any idea how hard it is to come up with good interview questions? By posting the question and solution online (complete with an md5sum and everything!), he has ruined the question, and his employer will now need to spend a significant amount of time coming up with another way to evaluate candidates.
Re: I was asked to crack a program in a job interview
#40This reminds me of the popular binary bomb lab offered in some computer architecture courses: http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/labs.html
I loved this - a lot of the students really struggled but I already had background in reverse engineering, it was right down my alley. I absolutely loved this and for a long time, it's what I wanted to do professionally.