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2026found by harvest

BearcatCTF 2026 - Setting Sail

26 challenges with 44 published solutions between them. No writeups were ever filed against this event's listing, so its solutions were found in public repositories instead. Each link is pinned to the commit it was read from.

The event listing

Cryptography6

Recover a plaintext or a key from something that was supposed to protect it. In practice: identify the scheme, find the parameter the author got wrong, exploit it.

Solve it with:Cipher identifier and automatic decoderVigenere cipher solver with automatic key recoveryRSA decryption and attack runnerWiener’s attack on small RSA private exponentsIn-browser hash cracker with rule transformsLearn: Classical ciphers and frequency analysisLearn: RSA and the parameters that break it

Misc5

Everything that fits no other box: esolangs, puzzles, scripting exercises, and the jail escapes that have not yet earned their own category.

Solve it with:Brainfuck and esolang decoderCipher identifier and automatic decoderRegex tester with match offsets and capture groupsLearn: Recognising encodings

Reverse engineering5

Work out what a compiled program does without its source, then work backwards from the check to the input that passes it.

Solve it with:Strings extractor for binaries and blobsWebAssembly disassemblerJava .class disassemblerPython .pyc bytecode disassemblerLearn: Binary exploitation

OSINT4

Answer a question about the real world from public sources. The work is pivoting between identifiers, not exploiting anything.

Solve it with:EXIF metadata viewerQR code decoder

Binary exploitation4

Turn a memory-safety bug in a native binary into control of execution. Usually a stack overflow, a format string, or a heap primitive.

Solve it with:ROP gadget finderShellcode assembler and libraryCyclic pattern generator and offset finderFormat string exploit builderLearn: Binary exploitation

Forensics1

Recover something from a file, a capture, or a disk image - often from a part of it the format says is unused.

Solve it with:File type identifier by magic bytesMagic byte and file signature tablePCAP analyzer for CTF network forensicsEXIF metadata viewerLearn: File forensics and carvingLearn: Network forensics

Uncategorised1

The upstream scoreboard did not say, so neither do we.

Solve it with:Cipher identifier and automatic decoderLearn: Recognising encodings

Other 2026 events