Ethernaut: Delegation

Ethernaut: Delegation

My take on CTFs

CTFs constitute a crucial part in the process of becoming a successful security researcher as they require from you an eye for details, a good understanding of solidity and great technical skills to perform the attack and capture the flag. The most talented security researchers are great at CTFs, at solving them of course and sometimes at designing them. CTFs will not turn you into a great web3 security researcher over night, but it will surely arm you with good enough technical skills to be able to write decent coded PoCs to have your finding validated and maybe get selected for report.

What is Ethernaut?

Ethernaut is a CTF(Capture The Flag) developed by the openzeppelin team that you most propbably already heard of. If you haven't, consider taking a look at this roadmap https://www.0xjarix.com/if-i-had-to-start-again/
This CTF gathers 31 challenges for the moment, this number keeps increasing so check their website every now and then: https://ethernaut.openzeppelin.com/
Maybe you'll design your challenge one day and send it to the openzeppelin team.

Also why you here?

Of all the kinds of articles I publish, CTF writeups are those I wish you read the least. I am a big advocate of giving everything the time it needs, if you cannot solve a challenge that you know for a contains an intentional bug in such a small codebase, do not expect to do really well in the contests. There are 2 reasons why someone can fail at solving a challenge, and when I say 'fail' I mean giving up and looking at the writeups, knowing damn well these CTFs are not time-bounded. So if you failed you either:

  • aren't ready for this challenge yet and that is most probably due to the fact that you skipped some steps in the roadmap
  • are lazy, you read the challenge, read the codebase, maybe not enough times, you had some assumptions maybe, you might have identified some entrypoints or some conditions to bypass or break, but you did not give it enough time, you did not allow yourself to succeed and that's a shame
💡
StErMi provided us with a github repo to solve ethernaut challenges in foundry, you can fork it, remove his solutions and try solving the challenges just like I'm doing
GitHub - 0xjarix/foundry-ethernaut: My solutions to the ethernaut CTF
My solutions to the ethernaut CTF. Contribute to 0xjarix/foundry-ethernaut development by creating an account on GitHub.

Delegation

The goal of this level is for you to claim ownership of the instance you are given.

Things that might help

  • Look into Solidity's documentation on the delegatecall low level function, how it works, how it can be used to delegate operations to on-chain libraries, and what implications it has on execution scope.
  • Fallback methods
  • Method ids

Reasoning

If you read about delegateCall() you would know that the contract that's making the delegateCall() has its storage as well as msg.sender and this persist inside the target contract, my solution is quite self-explanatory.

Attack
0:00
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Me when I move back to my parents' to exploit my mother through a delegateCall(housework) so I can focus on audits (I promised her good payouts but I don't even have 3 figures yet)