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2021from public repositories

Phack 2021

22 challenges with 22 published solutions between them. The writeups for this event were found in public repositories. Each link is pinned to the commit it was read from.

Where these writeups live

Forensics8

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

Uncategorised5

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

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

Misc4

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

Steganography2

Find the payload hidden inside a carrier that looks ordinary. Bit planes, appended data, metadata, and audio spectrograms.

Solve it with:LSB steganography extractorPNG chunk analyzerAudio spectrogram and SSTV decoderZero-width character and text steganography decoderLearn: Steganography

Web2

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

Cryptography1

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

Other 2021 events