Time Travel Debugging with Codex

This post is a case study demonstrating how Time Travel Debugging (TTD) and the TTDObjectsPy tooling helped an LLM-driven reverse-engineering workflow solve the FLARE-ON 12 'FlareAuthenticator' challenge. By comparing two Codex sessions—one using TTD traces and one without—the author shows that TTD provided ground-truth execution evidence that enabled extraction of the exact validation state and recovery of the real flag, while the non-TTD session produced an incorrect inferred result; the writeup also outlines practical caveats around trace capture and operational overhead.