H7CTF 2026 Finals
- Starts
- Ends
- Runs for
- 24 hours
- Format
- Attack-Defense (onsite, Chennai, Tamil Nadu)
- Rating weight
- Unrated by CTFtime
- Teams registered
- 11
Run by H7Tex, with prizes listed on CTFtime.
What the organisers say
H7CTF v3 Finals: An onsite cyber-security challenge hosted at SRMIST, bringing together the top teams from a unified global qualification round. Teams will compete in a real-world attack-defense environment, testing their capabilities across offensive and defensive domains.
Prep briefing
What past editions were made of
Counted across 18 challenges from 2025, 2024, 2024, 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”.
- web 29%(5)
- misc 29%(5)
- rev 24%(4)
- forensics 12%(2)
- crypto 6%(1)
What to have open when it starts
Web
Read the token before you read the source. A session cookie that decodes is the shortest path through half the web board.
- JWT decoder and signature verifier
- Flask session cookie decoder
- HTTP request replayer
- Directory and path scanner
- HTTP security header analyzer
New to this? Read Web attacks and session tokens
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
Reversing
Identify the binary before you open it. Knowing it is a .pyc, a JAR or a stripped ELF decides the next hour.
- ELF, PE and Mach-O binary analyzer
- Strings extractor for binaries and blobs
- Python .pyc bytecode disassembler
- Java .class disassembler
- WebAssembly disassembler
New to this? Read Reverse engineering
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
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.
- Had Lunchmisc · 2024 · 2 writeups
- Layered Circuitsmisc · 2024 · 2 writeups
- No Pasteweb · 2024 · 2 writeups
- Scrambled Pathwaysrev · 2024 · 2 writeups
- Unfairmisc · 2024 · 2 writeups
- Baby Sharingancrypto · 2025 · 1 writeup