ABB encode.exe SRE

Aidan — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 20:57:00 +0000

ABB encode.exe static reverse engineering

This post examines an old .exe available on the ABB forums that encodes RAPID modules. It never makes any claims of encryption, for good reason. The encoding is unreadable to a human, but entirely reversible once loaded into an ABB robot controller, which is what made me interested in it in the first place. We will begin with a short preface, then dive into static reverse engineering, explain how the encoding works along the way, and unfortunately end with a note on why I can’t share a script to restore encoded modules.

picoCTF Riscy Writeup

Aidan — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 14:12:00 +0000

Riscy

Analysis and solution of picoCTF’s RE Hard question Riscy

First contact

First thing was to run file on the provided binary, which yields the following:

`1`	`riscy: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, UCB RISC-V, RVC, double-float ABI, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, stripped`

As expected based on the title, RISC-V. Just a few points of interest, RVC means we can expect to see compressed instructions, which are the same but smaller. e.g. li can become c.li, using half the size for the instruction at the cost of supporting smaller values to load. It’s statically linked, so no external libraries needed, but also that means that’s not a method to attack it. Finally, it’s stripped, which isn’t the end of the world, an ELF will always give us entry.

Writeup on The Owlgorithm

ABB encode.exe SRE

ABB encode.exe static reverse engineering

picoCTF Riscy Writeup

Riscy

First contact