UIUCTF 2017 Writeups

I competed in UIUCTF this year with Aaron Cao. We ended up placing 23rd with 1300 points. Here are some of the solutions to the challenges I solved.

High School Crypto (100 points, crypto)

EasyCTF 2017 Wrap-up

EasyCTF just concluded this Monday! Looking back on the competition, I’d say that this year was our best year ever. Let’s take a look at some of the stats.

• 5,837 users registered this year, playing on 2,742 teams. Of those teams, 1,938 teams scored points.

VolgaCTF 2017 Writeups

I participated in VolgaCTF under the team Shell Smash. We finished in 138th place with 600 points. Here are the write-ups for the problems that I did.

VC (50 points)

Why I think HTML is a programming language.

Yep, I’m one of those people. Go ahead and judge me, but at least hear me out first.

Obviously, the first thing we have to do in order to answer the “Is HTML a programming language?” question is to define what a programming…

OverTheWire: Narnia

Level 0: Simple Buffer Overflow

We’re given a buffer of 20 characters and an int. The program reads 24 characters from input, exactly overwriting the int. The exploit code:

(python -c ‘print “\xef\xbe\xad\xde” * 6’; cat) |…

Watch out, returning users!

A lot of websites put cookies on your computer in order to save information about your previous visits to the site. The most common use case would be storing a key that would allow your computer to auto-login to the site the next time you visited it (rather than forcing you to…

Wi-Fi Problems when Installing Linux on ASUS machines

Recently, I’ve been exploring installing various Linux distributions over my Windows installation. The main reason for doing this would be not having to pull up a virtual machine every time I wanted to do anything.

So, you can detect whether I use an ad-blocker or not, eh?

Guess it’s one less site I’m going to be wasting my time on now.

I know it’s an important part of making revenue or whatever, but from the user’s standpoint, ads should be non-intrusive. That means I…