PWN environment setup on Win11 using WSL2

Having a good environment is a must when you want to do binary exploitaton. Here I will show you how to set up a simple environment using Ubuntu and WSL2 so you can straight up jump into finding and writing your exploits.

Agenda

Things we will be setting up:

• Ubuntu inside our Windows WSL2
• Pwntools library for writing exploits
• PwnDbg for debugging and finding vulnerability on programms

Setting up Ubuntu on WSL2

Change WSL version to 2

wsl --set-default-version 2

Searching for our distribution in the online marketplace

wsl --list --online

Installing our distribution with a suitable version. Here I will be instaling Ubuntu 24.04 which comes under their LTS

 wsl --install -d Ubuntu-24.04

After the installation, it will prompt you to set up a user with a password. After which it will drop you to your user shell and you should be able to see something like this.

Configuring 32-bit environment

Since the distribution we installed is of 64-bit, we must set it up to run 32-bit programs as well. Its very common in CTFs that we receive 32-bit binaries.

Installing all the necessary packages and libraries.

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt install build-essential

sudo apt install gcc-multilib

Setting up PwnTools library

Pwntools is a CTF framework and exploit development library. Written in Python, it is designed for rapid prototyping and development, and intended to make exploit writing as simple as possible.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-dev git libssl-dev libffi-dev build-essential
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip
python3 -m pip install --upgrade pwntools

Working around the PIP upgrade error

There are many solutions to it. The best and the recommended one is to set up a virtual environment. The second would be to use the --break-system-packages tag with our pip command and the third is to set up a config so that we dont have to pass the tag everytime we use pip.

Lets set up a config for our pip

mkdir .config
mkdir .config/pip
touch .config/pip/pip.conf

edit pip.conf

1
[global]
2
break-system-packages = true

Now we should be able to continue our installing without any errors.

We can confirm our installation by loading the library into Python

Setting up PwnDbg

PwnDbg is a GDB plug-in that makes debugging with GDB suck less, with a focus on features needed by low-level software developers, hardware hackers, reverse-engineers and exploit developers.

First lets start by installing gdb

sudo apt install gdb

Installing and setting up PwnDbg

git clone https://github.com/pwndbg/pwndbg
cd pwndbg
./setup.sh

Resources

• PwnTools - http://pwntools.com/
• PwnDbg - https://pwndbg.re/
• How to install Linux on Windows with WSL
• Windows Subsystem for Linux

FAQ

What to do after this?

Well, I would suggest installing a code editor such as VSCode on your host machine for you to write exploits or you can be a chad and install neovim on your linux.

After that you can set up a disassembler and decompiler of your choice. There are many to choose from but these are some of my picks:

• Ghidra by NSA (yes the NSA)
• IDA by Hex Rays
• Binary Ninja by Vector 35
• Cutter by Rizin

Now that you are all set, the only thing left is to start hacking and writing exploits