Misc on The Owlgorithm

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.

Debugger breakpoint detection

Aidan — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 17:45:00 +0000

Overview

This article goes over a method to detect debuggers by looking for breakpoints in executable machine code loaded in memory.
It’s naive because the notion that a program’s .text section will only contain 0xCC when there’s a breakpoint is not true.
Regardless, this is a decent starting point to illustrate the concept of breakpoint detection.

Code

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdbool.h>

bool check_method(void* method, unsigned char start[], unsigned char stop[]);

#define BP_CHECKABLE(func_name) __attribute__((noinline, section(func_name "_bounds")))
#define BP_CHECK_PRE(func) \
    extern unsigned char __start_##func##_bounds[]; \
    extern unsigned char __stop_##func##_bounds[];
#define BP_CHECK(func) check_method(func, __start_##func##_bounds, __stop_##func##_bounds)

// True if there's a breakpoint
bool check_method(void* method, unsigned char start[], unsigned char stop[])
{
	void* start_ptr = (void *)start;
	void* stop_ptr = (void *)stop;
	size_t size = stop_ptr - start_ptr;
	for (long bytecode = (long)start_ptr; bytecode < (long)stop_ptr; bytecode++)
	{
		unsigned char op = *((unsigned char* )bytecode);
		if (op == 0xCC)
		{
			return true;
		}
	}
	return false;
}

BP_CHECKABLE("checkme") void checkme()
{
	printf("I'm doing something\n");
}

BP_CHECKABLE ("main") int main()
{
	BP_CHECK_PRE(checkme);
	if (BP_CHECK(checkme))
	{
		printf("Breakpoints found in checkme\n");
	} else {
		printf("No breakpoints found in checkme\n");
	}

	BP_CHECK_PRE(main);
	if (BP_CHECK(main))
	{
		printf("Breakpoints found in main\n");
	} else {
		printf("No breakpoints found in main\n");
	}
}

Explanation

Macro weirdness

There are 3 macros, BP_CHECKABLE, BP_CHECK_PRE, and BP_CHECK.

Radar scope

Aidan — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 12:31:00 +0000

Overview

This project aimed to be a weekend project, to create a system that can display nearby aircraft. The system will consist of a Raspberry Pi, a software defined radio (SDR), and a display. The SDR will be used to receive ADS-B signals from aircraft, and the Raspberry Pi will process and display the data. The ADS-B signals are sent to FlightRadar24, a public service that tracks aircraft and displays them on a map.