I was pretty surprised that few people solved this one. I think there may have been an issue with the binary originally published where NX was enabled. This cost me a bit of time but no matter. We solved it easily in the end. It’s a two part pwnable. A guessing game where you have to guess a number and receive higher/lower replies. When you win you get to enter your name.

The inaugural BSides Canberra Australia was held this Friday and Saturday and of course since we were going to be there we entered their CTF. I was expecting a small competition with reasonably basic challenges but what I got was a huge pool of great challenges to choose from. We did well and fought hard but a couple of mistakes cost us a lot of time so 3rd place was the best we could achieve. Prizes were amazing though (SANS NetWars entry!), even for 3rd place so I’m very happy!

VolgaCTF stepped up the difficulty this year over last year. Good stuff! Too bad they decided not to use IRC because they probably could’ve done a better job communicating. There were a lot of server issues and the programming (PPC) challenges were built to require way too many rounds. Tic-tac-toe was 2,000 rounds to begin with but it was quickly obvious the servers couldn’t handle the intered. Anyway! I digress from this writeup too much.

Cool Brazillian based CTF which I haven’t played before. One of the remarkable things about this CTF was the sheer number and breadth of challenges we could go for. They had everything from Electronics to Crypto to Reversing to Physics and Programming challenges! For this one we finished in 10th place so I am very happy with our team work!

What a fun challenge. I’ve heard of some very simple solutions after I solved it but I’m fairly certain this way is the intended solution.