Security & Threat Intelligence · 25.07.2026, 15:29 UTC
Time Travel Debugging with Codex
| Schweregrad | info |
|---|---|
| Kategorie | Security & Threat Intelligence |
| Quelle | SpecterOps ↗ |
| Veröffentlicht | 25.07.2026 UTC |
Sicherheitsmeldung mit Schweregrad noch nicht bewertet. Technische Details im Tab „Originaltext“; empfohlene Schritte in der Checkliste.
Spoiler warning: this post discusses the FLARE-ON 12 `FlareAuthenticator` challenge and includes the recovered flag.
Introduction
Before getting into the technical details, this work was made possible through SpecterOps’ partnership with OpenAI’s through the Trusted Access for Cyber program. I also want to thank SpecterOps, my employer, for supporting this research and giving me time to explore, build, and test the workflow described here.
Reverse engineering sits at the center of malware analysis and vulnerability research. When an incident lands on an analyst’s desk, the source code is usually unavailable. What they get instead is an opaque executable, often packed, obfuscated, or intentionally structured to mislead the person looking at it. The reverse engineer’s job is to open the file in tools like Ghidra and a debugger, collect evidence, take notes, and slowly build a defensible explanation of what the program actually does.
Frontier models are starting to change that workflow. They can triage decompiler output, drive tools, write instrumentation, summarize findings, and keep multiple lines of investigation moving at once. But binaries are not open-source repositories: decompiled code is lossy, function boundaries can be fuzzy, control flow can be flattened, and runtime-generated state may not appear clearly in static analysis at all.
That is where LLMs can still struggle. A model may avoid outright hallucination, but still spend a long time following a path that only looks important. Anyone who has reversed a piece of malware has seen this happen: one branch …