BSidesSF CTF 2018: Coder Series (Author's PoV)

david@systemoverlord.com (David Tomaschik) — Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

As the author of the “coder” series of challenges (Intel Coder, ARM Coder, Poly Coder, and OCD Coder) in the recent BSidesSF CTF, I wanted to share my perspective on the challenges. I can’t tell if the challenges were uninteresting, too hard, or both, but they were solved by far fewer teams than I had expected. (And than we had rated the challenges for when scoring them.)

The entire series of challenges were based on the premise “give me your shellcode and I’ll run it”, but with some limitations. Rather than forcing players to find and exploit a vulnerability, we wanted to teach players about dealing with restricted environments like sandboxes, unusual architectures, and situations where your shellcode might be manipulated by the process before it runs.

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BSidesSF CTF 2018: Coder Series (Author's PoV)

Introduction