CITCTF write-ups, Defcon

As previously mentioned, last week-end was CIT CTF. It was great, thank you! Again, I played with Nibbles and wow.. we managed arrive in 1st place! Nibbles plans to release a document with our write-ups (instead of multiple blog posts), but meanwhile you can find some of my notes in my citctf directory:

• Matryoshka: hundreds of nested passworded archives just like Russian nesting dolls. Questions were answered with google and automated extraction with some shell.
• What is her name: interesting steganography, with embedded files into a picture, and finally the password revealed by diff'ing two pictures. And no, her name was not Darya ;)
• Damned traffic: a weird tcpdump output with pictures, ICMP's, fragmented IP with UDP. I had fun playing with Python and my favourite network packet manipulation tool Scapy but did not find anything, nor any other team, and sadly staff did not release any hint.. I'm wondering if they plan to release the solution or if we will never find out what it was.
• Time bomb: a real time bomb in BASIC code along with the schematics, we had to find the exact time & location of explosion. We thought we had it, but sadly we failed :( I'm looking forward other write-ups to understand what it really was.

Update: very good writeups by @citizen_stig.

And as you probably know this week-end there is another competition: Defcon CTF Quals. First time for me, again playing with Nibbles, we will try to have fun and do our best! Good luck if you are a player too.

Codegate, HES2010, citctf

As you may know, I played Codegate CTF quals with Nibbles and we managed to be #11. As you can see, there was many good write-ups on the challenges. Despite being 11th, my friend SiD & I had the chance to go in Korea to play CTF finals and it was great: discovering Korea, playing CTF (managed to arrive 4th!), meeting other teams, conference speakers and other nice people. Also, networking session was awesome! I didn't have the time to see the conferences, but it reported to be very good as well.

Challenges by LM**2 were again interesting, excellent write-up from HFS (winners) for the encrypted shellcode (only team to solve it!). I should write-up on some challenges too if I have time. In the meantime I would love to see the challenges available on the net, maybe on intruded?

To conclude Codegate 2010 was amazing, well-organized by Softforum, great people and a lot of fun. You can find nice pictures of the whole event from yoggy0 and team PPP our CTF friends. I will definitely do my best to return next year if there is a Codegate 2011 :)

At the same time, Hackito Ergo Sum (HES) security conference was happening in France: impressive program and speakers (slides are available), they also organized a wargame with OverTheWire guys (reputed for their good online challenges), and recently even made it available among their other wargames (thank you, starting to play hehe!).

Among the next events are CIT CTF on May 15-16 (registration) from our Russian friends of Codegate, and obviously Defcon CTF quals on May 21-24 (registration). Good luck and have fun if you're a player too!