SunshineCTF 2026
- Starts
- Ends
- Runs for
- 48 hours
- Format
- Jeopardy (online)
- Rating weight
- 51.63 - Flagship
- Teams registered
- 2
Run by Knightsec, with prizes listed on CTFtime.
What the organisers say
Welcome to the eleventh (!) year of SunshineCTF, hosted by Hack@UCF in affiliation with BSides Orlando 2026. See our website for the most accurate and up to date information! Infra sponsored by goo.gle/ctfsponsorship
Prep briefing
What past editions were made of
Counted across 133 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 36%(38)
- pwn 18%(19)
- web 13%(14)
- rev 11%(12)
- crypto 10%(11)
- forensics 10%(10)
- osint 1%(1)
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
Pwn
Get the offset and the libc base mechanically, so the thinking is spent on the chain rather than on arithmetic.
- Cyclic pattern generator and offset finder
- Buffer overflow offset finder
- Libc base address calculator
- ROP gadget finder
- Pwntools exploit script generator
New to this? Read Binary exploitation
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
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
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.
- Lunar Authweb · 2025 · 5 writeups
- Drone Adventurepwn · 2024 · 4 writeups
- Forgeweb · 2025 · 4 writeups
- Lunar Shopweb · 2025 · 4 writeups
- Dillmisc · 2023 · 3 writeups
- Intergalactic Copyright Infringementforensics · 2025 · 3 writeups