Context

Context is a global object used to store information about the target binary and the environment in which it's being run. Several attributes can be set.

Primary Attributes

context.arch

This can be used to set the architecture of the target binary. It is useful for packing and unpacking data and for generation of shellcode.

context.arch = 'i386'

context.os

We can use this to set the operating system of the target binary. This is useful for shellcode generation.

context.os = 'linux'

context.endian

We can use this to set the endianness of the target binary. This is useful for packing and unpacking data.

context.endian = 'little'

context.word_size

This can be used to set the word size of the target binary. It is useful for shellcode generation (and packing data with flat).

context.word_size = 32

Grouping this together

We can simply set context.binary to the binary we're using, and pwntools will automatically set the architecture, operating system, endianness, and word size.

This takes an ELF object. More information on the ELF class can be found here.

context.binary = ELF('./win32')

Other Attributes

context.log_level

We can set the verbosity of the output logger.

context.log_level = 'debug'

context.terminal

For those that use the tmux, we can use context.terminal to set how the window is split.

context.terminal = ['tmux', 'splitw', '-h']