After loading the VM, we are greeted with a login page.


The goal is to login to the account "Sandb0x".

The challenge description states that the password consists of 4 lowercase characters, where the first character is 'p'. As the VM is called pwnyOS, I immediately guessed the password to be "pwny" which surprisingly worked.


This was probably not the intended solution as the flag hints that it is supposed to be a Timing Side Channel attack. But oh well, whatever works I guess.


**Flag: uiuctf{t1ming_s1d3_chann3l_g4ng}**

Original writeup (https://deric.gitbook.io/ctf-writeups/uiuctf-2020/kernel-exploitation/kernel-time_to_start).