KOrUPt

Defcon CTF 09 Quals…

by KOrUPt on Jun.12, 2009, under General

Okay so recently I said I’d post my views regarding my experience at this years Defcon CTF qualifications…

This year we put forward a new and considerably stronger team than last year and we decided to go by the name of “Sapheads”, for those wondering, the definition of a “saphead” is an “idiot”, this name was chosen out of comedic value with [I assume] the intention of having a touch of irony to it… Similar to Lastplace, who tend to end up in first place ;) (props @tlas and co ;) ).

In fact, our team this year is the combined force of three of last years teams…

We finished 11th,  after 48 hours of what seemed to be near non-stop analysis, I got a passive 4 hours sleep during that period.

Our final result I think goes to show just how important it is to be well prepared, organized and to communicate correctly. Our team members excelled themselves and without the collaboration between us I doubt we’d of done as well as we did…

Binary Leetness 400 is a prime example of this, I served as my teams binary analyst. 85MB’s of JPEG’s… To a binary analyst, that doesn’t mean much… Though I was able to put together some of the puzzle. After handing the file down to our teams forensics expert, he eventually came back to us with an executable which I was able to provide an analysis of… That said, without his efforts, we wouldn’t have solved the challenge.

During the qualification rounds, good resource utilization is also helpful… Thinking about it, I did initially intend to stock 20 or so energy drinks, don’t know what happened to that plan though.

I think most of our team this year were a bit apprehensive once they’d learned that Kenshoto had stepped down and Ddtek opted to fill their shoes(props to you guys!)… I know I was! None of us were sure what to expect this year.

My initial impression wasn’t a very good one, the scoreboard was very slow to begin with and some of the services were periodically updated which threw a few of us off during mid-analysis. However, I have to admit the Ddtek crew did a very very good job to resolve the issues at hand, after a while things where once again bearable and all went well. I think I speak for everyone when I say we all had a great time!

Our team did solve all of the Binary Leetness challenges, which is something I’m proud of. We’ll be doing write up’s soon, as it stands I’ve already done a write up for the Binary Leetness 300 challenge, which can be found via a quick search.

Currently we intend to solve some of the challenges we weren’t able to solve during the qualification rounds and hopefully do write up’s of their solutions.

That said, I’m just one side of this team, you can find the rest of us over at http://www.sapheads.org, I’ll be mirroring most of the content here over there, with the intention of having a more centralized source of information for you all :) . I hope you all drop by sometime ;) .

I’d like to conclude this post by extending a very big thank you to the ddtek team, and of course Kenshoto, who also put on a very good game over the years.

To my team, very good job, we will only continue to get stronger ;) .

DDTek, best of luck handling the CTF at Defcon, I’m sure you’ll do well… P.S Mars, let me know how it goes if possible :) .

That just about wraps this article up for now I think… At this rate I’ll have to make a category specifically for Defcon related content :D .

References:

http://www.sapheads.org/ < our team.

http://ddtek.biz/ < this years ctf organizers.

http://shallweplayaga.me/ < VedaGodz.

http://brycekerley.net/blog/2009/06/trivia300.html < Bryce’s T300 solution.

Signing off.

~ KOrUPt.

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