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2025found by harvest

HackornCTF 2025 Quals

23 challenges with 29 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

Misc6

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

Uncategorised4

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

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

Web3

Reach data or functionality the application meant to keep from you - through its inputs, its tokens, or its trust in the client.

Solve it with:JWT decoder and signature verifierJWT alg=none bypass generatorWeb attack payload catalogJWT secret brute forceLearn: Sessions, tokens and access control

Cryptography3

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

Forensics3

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

Binary exploitation2

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

OSINT2

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

Other 2025 events