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2023found by harvest

HTB University CTF 2023: Brains & Bytes

11 challenges with 20 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

Cryptography5

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

Uncategorised3

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

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

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

Reverse engineering1

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

Other 2023 events