DEADFACE CTF 2026
- Starts
- Ends
- Runs for
- 34 hours
- Format
- Jeopardy (online)
- Rating weight
- 35.39 - Strong field
- Teams registered
- 17
Run by Cyber Hacktics, with prizes listed on CTFtime.
What the organisers say
DEADFACE CTF features jeopardy-style challenges and is hosted by Cyber Hacktics and veterans of the United States Air Force in support of National Cyber Security Awareness Month.
Prep briefing
What past editions were made of
Counted across 301 challenges from 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, using the categories the scoreboards themselves used. Two things to hold in mind while reading it. The archive indexes challenges that someone published a solution to, not whole scoreboards, so this is the shape of what people wrote about rather than of everything that was set. And where a scoreboard gave no category the challenge lands in misc, so a large misc slice means “unlabelled” rather than “miscellaneous”.
- misc 29%(50)
- forensics 14%(25)
- crypto 13%(23)
- stego 11%(20)
- osint 9%(15)
- web 8%(14)
- pwn 8%(14)
- rev 7%(13)
What to have open when it starts
Misc
Misc is whatever did not fit, which in practice means encodings and esolangs. Identify, do not guess.
- Cipher identifier and automatic decoder
- Recipe builder: chain decodes and transforms
- Brainfuck and esolang decoder
- Base64 decoder and encoder
- Regex tester with match offsets and capture groups
New to this? Read Recognising encodings, Misc and esoteric languages
Forensics
Start with the file's own claim about itself, then with what is appended after it ends. Both are one paste away.
- File type identifier by magic bytes
- Hex viewer and hexdump
- ZIP archive inspector
- PCAP analyzer for CTF network forensics
- Memory dump, disk image and registry hive analysis
New to this? Read File forensics and carving, Network forensics, Memory and disk forensics
Crypto
Have the cipher identifier open on the first paste. Most of the round-one crypto is a classical cipher or an RSA parameter mistake, and both are recognised faster than they are solved.
- Cipher identifier and automatic decoder
- RSA decryption and attack runner
- XOR cipher decoder and key recovery
- Vigenere cipher solver with automatic key recovery
- Modular arithmetic and number theory toolkit
New to this? Read Classical ciphers and frequency analysis, XOR and the cost of reusing a key, RSA and the parameters that break it
Stego
Run the sweep rather than guessing the tool. The solver tries the standard carriers in order and tells you which one held something.
- Automatic steganography solver
- LSB steganography extractor
- PNG chunk analyzer
- Audio spectrogram and SSTV decoder
- Zero-width character and text steganography decoder
New to this? Read Steganography
The challenges people wrote about most
From previous editions, ordered by how many published solutions each attracted. Reading two solutions to one of these is the closest thing to a warm-up for this event that exists.
- The Countmisc · 2021 · 9 writeups
- Sqlunknown · 2023 · 8 writeups
- All A-Loanweb · 2021 · 6 writeups
- Monstrum ex Machinaforensics · 2021 · 6 writeups
- Trick or Treatmisc · 2021 · 6 writeups
- A Warningforensics · 2021 · 5 writeups