Middle East Technical University Department of Computer Engineering

CENG 331
Computer Organization
Fall 2024-2025
Homework 1: The Bomb Lab

Due date: 07 November 2024, Thursday, 23:59

1 Introduction
The nefarious Dr. Evil has planted a slew of “binary bombs” on our class machines. A binary bomb is a program that
consists of a sequence of phases. Each phase expects you to type a particular string on stdin. If you type the correct
string, then the phase is defused and the bomb proceeds to the next phase. Otherwise, the bomb explodes by printing
"BOOM!!!" and then terminating. The bomb is defused when every phase has been defused.
There are too many bombs for us to deal with, so we are giving each student a bomb to defuse. Your mission, which
you have no choice but to accept, is to defuse your bomb before the due date. Good luck, and welcome to the bomb
squad!

Step 1: Get Your Bomb

In the feedback section of the ODTUClass assignment page, you will find a feedback file called bombk.tar.xz,
where k is the unique number of your bomb.
Save the bombk.tar.xz file to a (protected) directory in which you plan to do your work. Then give the command:
tar -xJvf bombk.tar.xz. This will create a directory called ./bombk with the following files:

• README: Identifies the bomb and its owner.

• bomb: The executable binary bomb.
• bomb.c: Source file with the bomb’s main routine and a friendly greeting from Dr. Evil.

Step 2: Defuse Your Bomb

Your job for this lab is to defuse your bomb.

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You must do the assignment on one of the inek machines. In fact, there is a rumor that Dr. Evil really is evil, and the
bomb will always blow up if run elsewhere. There are several other tamper-proofing devices built into the bomb as
well, or so we hear.
You can use many tools to help you defuse your bomb. Please look at the hints section for some tips and ideas. The
best way is to use your favorite debugger to step through the disassembled binary.
Each time your bomb explodes it notifies the bomblab server, and you lose 1/2 point (up to a max of 20 points) in the
final score for the lab. So there are consequences to exploding the bomb. You must be careful!
The first four phases are worth 10 points each. Phases 5 and 6 are a little more difficult, so they are worth 15 points
each. So the maximum score you can get is 70 points.
Although phases get progressively harder to defuse, the expertise you gain as you move from phase to phase should
offset this difficulty. However, the last phase will challenge even the best students, so please don’t wait until the last
minute to start.
The bomb ignores blank input lines. If you run your bomb with a command line argument, for example,

linux> ./bomb psol.txt

then it will read the input lines from psol.txt until it reaches EOF (end of file), and then switch over to stdin.
In a moment of weakness, Dr. Evil added this feature so you don’t have to keep retyping the solutions to phases you
have already defused.
To avoid accidentally detonating the bomb, you will need to learn how to single-step through the assembly code and
how to set breakpoints. You will also need to learn how to inspect both the registers and the memory states. One of
the nice side-effects of doing the lab is that you will get very good at using a debugger. This is a crucial skill that will
pay big dividends the rest of your career.

Logistics
This is an individual project. Clarifications and corrections will be posted on the ODTUClass.

Handin: All handins are electronic. You need to upload your solution text file to ODTUClass. However, this is just
a precaution as the bomb will notify the server automatically about your progress as you work on it. You can keep
track of your grade by looking at the class scoreboard at:

http://144.122.71.31:15213/scoreboard

This web page is updated every 30 seconds to show the progress for each bomb. Note that you need to be on the
METU network to connect to this server. Use METU VPN for off-campus access.

Hints (Please read this!)

There are many ways of defusing your bomb. You can examine it in great detail without ever running the program,
and figure out exactly what it does. This is a useful technique, but it not always easy to do. You can also run it under
a debugger, watch what it does step by step, and use this information to defuse it. This is probably the fastest way of
defusing it.

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We do make one request, please do not use brute force! You could write a program that will try every possible key to
find the right one. But this is no good for several reasons:

• You lose 1/2 point (up to a max of 20 points) every time you guess incorrectly and the bomb explodes.
• Every time you guess wrong, a message is sent to the bomblab server. You could very quickly saturate the
network with these messages, and cause the system administrators to revoke your computer access.
• We haven’t told you how long the strings are, nor have we told you what characters are in them. Even if you
made the (incorrect) assumptions that they all are less than 100 characters long and only contain letters, then
you will have 26100 guesses for each phase. This will take a very long time to run, and you will not get the
answer before the assignment is due.

There are many tools which are designed to help you figure out both how programs work, and what is wrong when
they don’t work. Here is a list of some of the tools you may find useful in analyzing your bomb, and hints on how to
use them.

• gdb
The GNU debugger, this is a command line debugger tool available on virtually every platform. You can trace
through a program line by line, examine memory and registers, look at both the source code and assembly code
(we are not giving you the source code for most of your bomb), set breakpoints, set memory watch points, and
write scripts.
The CS:APP web site

http://csapp.cs.cmu.edu/public/students.html

has a very handy single-page gdb summary that you can print out and use as a reference. Here are some other
tips for using gdb.
– To keep the bomb from blowing up every time you type in a wrong input, you’ll want to learn how to set
breakpoints.
– For online documentation, type “help” at the gdb command prompt, or type “man gdb”, or “info
gdb” at a Unix prompt. Some people also like to run gdb under gdb-mode in emacs.
• objdump -t
This will print out the bomb’s symbol table. The symbol table includes the names of all functions and global
variables in the bomb, the names of all the functions the bomb calls, and their addresses. You may learn
something by looking at the function names!
• objdump -d
Use this to disassemble all of the code in the bomb. You can also just look at individual functions. Reading the
assembler code can tell you how the bomb works.
Although objdump -d gives you a lot of information, it doesn’t tell you the whole story. Calls to system-level
functions are displayed in a cryptic form. For example, a call to sscanf might appear as:

8048c36: e8 99 fc ff ff call 80488d4 <_init+0x1a0>

To determine that the call was to sscanf, you would need to disassemble within gdb.
• strings
This utility will display the printable strings in your bomb.

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Looking for a particular tool? How about documentation? Don’t forget, the commands apropos, man, and info
are your friends. In particular, man ascii might come in useful. info gas will give you more than you ever
wanted to know about the GNU Assembler. Also, the web may also be a treasure trove of information. If you get
stumped, feel free to ask the teaching assistants for help.