I Built a Windows Debugger From Scratch to Actually See a Stack Smash Happen -

7 relevance

Deep technical dive into building a Windows debugger from scratch, high novelty and technical depth but less relevant to AI/infra focus.

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Why It Matters

For a solutions architect focused on low-level debugging and binary exploitation, this project offers a practical, hands-on reference for how the Windows Debug API works under the hood, which can inform tooling decisions for security-sensitive platform engineering.

Key Takeaways

Study the Windows Debug API (CreateProcessA with DEBUG_ONLY_THIS_PROCESS, WaitForDebugEvent, GetThreadContext) to build custom debuggers or crash-analysis tools for your own platform engineering needs.

I Built a Windows Debugger From Scratch to Actually See a Stack Smash Happen -

Summary

expl0itra is a Windows binary debugger built from scratch using C++ and the Windows Debug API, paired with a Flutter GUI that displays live RIP/RBP register values and memory contents during execution. It catches second-chance exceptions like stack overflows and access violations, writes crash analytics to a .txt file, and includes a VirusTotal pre-check. The tool demonstrated a classic stack smash by feeding a vulnerable C binary compiled without canaries, showing register overwrites live rather than post-mortem.

Author

Fabio Baensch