This weekend I played my first CTF of 2023, LACTF. Organized by ACM Cyber at UCLA. It featured plenty of challenges to keep me busy for the time I was able to play across pwn, reversing, crypto, misc, and web categories. I played with a team of friends and colleagues this time and focused mostly on Crypto, Pwn and Reversing categories.

Pretty fun CTF organized by the BlueHens CTF team from the University of Delaware. This one featured a bunch of Minecraft challenges but also the typical PWN, Crypto, Reversing and Web categories.

Another great CTF from HTB, this time it started at midnight for me with fresh new challenges each midnight for 5 nights. All the challenges seemed to be of quite high quality and had me thinking hard about the solutions.

Haven’t done any writeups lately as I’ve not been having much time to do CTFs. This CTF caught my attention on the weekend though for its approachable set of intro challenges. I ended up finishing 15th on the scoreboard. This challenge was interesting because of the unintended solutions. I’ll go through one of these below.

A unique combination of Python jailbreak and crypto flaw that had me learning a lot about AES-CBC mode. Super fun for me to get this solution working.