I’ve played CTF challenges where the latency to the host was a key factor in determining if you could get a flag or not. For those, I’ve often found it useful to spin up a cloud machine in a datacenter near the target (or, better yet, in the same datacenter if we can figure it out).
A very common case is when the challenge has a short timeout but requires a lot of interaction, e.g. you only get ten seconds but you have to perform 10000 queries for a heap spray or something.
The most insidious case I remember was a read() call that didn’t check the result, causing it to return short if the fragments of the input didn’t arrive fast enough.
A very common case is when the challenge has a short timeout but requires a lot of interaction, e.g. you only get ten seconds but you have to perform 10000 queries for a heap spray or something.
The most insidious case I remember was a read() call that didn’t check the result, causing it to return short if the fragments of the input didn’t arrive fast enough.