Huntress CTF <3

Early in October, Huntress started a CTF competition. It sounded like a casual and fun CTF competition that would lead to a couple of fun tasks and cool challenges, so of course me and my teammate Petter made an account and jumped into action.

30 days.. And 57 tasks later.. Countless of late evenings.. Long nights.. Blood sweat and tears.. (Okay maybe not blood). It is done. We managed to complete every single task Huntress threw at us. And my gosh! What a journey!

At the beginning, we got 2 tasks. 1 warmup and 1 normal task. These were fun and challenging, and we managed to do them within a reasonable time. 15 to 60 minutes on each task, fist bumps and high fives were given, and we could calm down in the evenings and chill.

After a week, the difficulty jumped from easy to medium. Often 2 tasks where some were easy and other were more difficult. We started to fall behind a little, but always managed to catch up in the end, making sure our backlog stayed clean.

2 weeks inn.. And it happened, the first medium challenge got released where we got really stuck. “Rock, paper physics” it is called. Me and my buddy were (And probably are) very new to reverse engineering, so this hit us hard. Learning complicated RE software took time and energy, and it kept us stuck for a while, new tasks were released, and our backlog started to fill up. Petter never gave up on the task, while I did my best to beat the new ones rolling inn, but this is where we started to fall behind.

3 weeks inn, and we had plenty of tasks we did not manage to do. It was hectic at work and the university, and we just did not have enough time to work on the CTF. It was looking grim, the dream of beating every single task was looking darker and we started to accept that this might be a way to optimistic dream. But then something clicked with me, using GPT to explain what is going on inside of Hydra enabled me to understand and exploit the binary programs I was decompiling. We had a big backlog of tasks, and I worked on tasks, one by one. Being persistence and using GPT to explain what I am looking at and why really helped me out of the gutter.

Week 4 came, and we had a few tasks in our backlog. It had been fun so far, but we could feel the exhaustion. But seeing the light in the end of the tunnel (Okay that’s a bit dramatic.. We could see the finish line!) we gave it our best. Task after task was finished. The last day, I was a bit unlucky since I had to work and go to a TU meeting (Class rep meeting in Norwegian) and lost plenty of time there. So, we landed on 43th place.. Which could have been better..

BUT WE DID IT! We did all the tasks! And my gosh, learned so much. All web application tasks we were comfortable with, but reverse engineering was rough. This was a real glass breaker for us, and we felt “forced” to learn RE to have a chance, something which was good! For a long time, I’ve felt the urge to learn it, but never gave myself a chance to do so.

My plan right now is to write writeups for most of the tasks. Some will be shorter and to the point, and others will be more detailed with thoughts and methodology. Can’t wait to share a part of this learning journey with the web!

Thank you so much Huntress for this awesome CTF. I know I might sound a bit tired and exhausted in the way that I write, but that is because it was equally as joyful as it was tiering. Can’t wait to join again next year! >:]

Writeups:

https://spaceylad.tech/speakfriend-medium
https://spaceylad.tech/crab-rave-hard
https://spaceylad.tech/blackcat-ii-hard
https://spaceylad.tech/blackcat-i-medium

spaceylad@proton.me

BUT WE DID IT!

We did all the tasks! And my gosh, learned so much. All web application tasks we were comfortable with, but reverse engineering was rough. This was a real glass breaker for us, and we felt “forced” to learn RE to have a chance, something which was good! For a long time, I’ve felt the urge to learn it, but never gave myself a chance to do so.

My plan right now is to write writeups for most of the tasks. Some will be shorter and to the point, and others will be more detailed with thoughts and methodology. Can’t wait to share a part of this learning journey with the web!

Thank you so much Huntress for this awesome CTF. I know I might sound a bit tired and exhausted in the way that I write, but that is because it was equally as joyful as it was tiering. Can’t wait to join again next year! >:]

A "very" accurate representation of our reaction when we got 43th place.. Made By DALLE-3.