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PWN environment setup on Win11 using WSL2

·3 mins·
Pwn Blog Tutorial
Aryan Gurung
Author
Aryan Gurung
security researcher and programmer
Table of Contents

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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

NOTE! I would still recommend to set up an virtual environment!

Lets set up a config for our pip

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

edit pip.conf

[global]
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
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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
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FAQ
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What to do after this?
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Well, I would suggest installing a code exitor 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:

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