All Writeups
Comprehensive collection of CTF challenges, solutions, and insights.
DEADROP Network 2 - DEADROP C2
A PCAP containing DNS exfiltration traffic where the flag is split across hex-encoded subdomain labels in a series of TXT queries. Extract and reassemble the labels in sequence to reconstruct and decode the flag.
DEADROP Forensics 4 - Redacted Blueprint
A PDF floor plan whose rooms spell OOPS from above, hiding a flag in an orphaned FlateDecode XObject with no page tree reference, invisible to all standard PDF viewers. Requires parsing raw PDF streams or hex editing to find and base64-decode the hidden object.
DEADROP Forensics 3 - svchost_1337
An ELF core dump with a flag encoded through four layers, ROT13, base64, hex, and XOR 0x7d, hidden in the NT_PRPSINFO note section. readelf -n and working backwards through each encoding layer recovers it.
WHAMazon! Network 3 - It wasn't me
Extracting a PowerShell hex-decoding payload from a DNS C2 packet capture using strings, then decoding the embedded hex string to recover the flag.
WHAMazon! Crypto 1 - Workers are Exhausted
Identifying hex-encoded XOR ciphertext and brute-forcing the single-byte key using a known-plaintext crib from the flag format.