The National Cybersecurity CTF Competition is meant for both beginners and experienced contestants, and it
consists of tasks ranging from simple to extremely difficult in various categories:
Cryptography
In this category, you'll attack poorly implemented crypto, outdated crypto, or use well-known vulnerabilities
to attack encrypted messages. You might be given for example a few RSA keys whose modulus share a factor, and
you decrypt a message encrypted by one of these keys
Binary Exploitation
The program you received is running as a service on a remote machine. Reverse-engineer it, figure out its
vulnerability, and use that to take exploit the remote service into serving you a flag. Often, there's a
flag.txt you can get the program to read, or perhaps it has a flag in memory you need to get it to
accidentally send you.
Web Exploitation
These challenges involve attacking common vulnerabilities in web technology. For example, you might need to
use SQL injection to read the "secret_flag" table of a database, use directory traversal to get a web server
to serve you "flag.txt", use Cross-Site Scripting to trick a simulated user to send you their password, or
bypass some client-side checks implemented by obfuscated javascript
Reverse Engineering
In this category You'll receive a program, but not the source, so you need to disassemble it, look at the
assembly, and figure out what it does. Programs can be x86 Windows, x86 Linux, ARM Linux, obfuscated Java, and
a whole bevy of more obscure formats
Forensics
This is a fairly broad category. You might receive an image of a disk in FAT format, and you'll need to
un-delete "flag.txt". Maybe you receive a zip file, that contains a 7z file, that contains a tar archive,
that
contains some obscure file format you've never heard of, and unpacking the entire chain eventually gives you
a
flag.
IoT
These challenges involve attacking Embedded/IoT devices. You might receive an Arduino board, and you'll need
to dump and analyse a firmware. Maybe you receive a binary program, that contains memory management
vulnerability, exploiting the entire flow gives you a priviliged access to read files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Maro at maroueneboubakri@gmail.com !
