Ethernaut: Naught Coin
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
Naught Coin
NaughtCoin is an ERC20 token and you're already holding all of them. The catch is that you'll only be able to transfer them after a 10 year lockout period. Can you figure out how to get them out to another address so that you can transfer them freely? Complete this level by getting your token balance to 0.
Things that might help
- The ERC20 Spec
- The OpenZeppelin codebase
Goal
level.balanceOf(player) = 0 but without waiting 10 years
Reasoning
- We are inheriting from OZ's ERC20, we're overriding the transfer(...) function, it now prevents us from transferring tokens before a certain period of time. Thus, we cannot use transfer(...) at all, we need another way
- Since we're inheriting from OZ's ERC20, we can use the function from the ERC20 contract to achieve what we want, what can we use to transfer tokens, other than transfer(...) right transferFrom(...), but we have to use approve(...) priorly
or, you can simply achieve this without a new contract, just like so: