PlaidCTF 2021: Leaky Block Cipher
PlaidCTF this year had very insane challenges. Although I have spent a lot of time working on those crypto challenges, I was only able to solve leaky block cipher. This completely legitimate™ block cipher looks a bit like GCM, but my computer plumber keeps complaining about water residue. Can you help me spot the leak? The challenge has a hand-crafted AEAD scheme. We are required to go through 20 rounds of challenges, and this is how each round proceeds...
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ångstromCTF 2021: Cache Money
I played ångstromCTF 2021 for @blackb6a to spend my Easter holiday. I solved most of the reverse and cryptography challenges alone. In particular, Cache Money is one of the harder crypto challenges that I spent more than one day tackling. It is very rewarding, and eventually four teams ended up solving it. This challenge reimplements the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) on 128, 192 and 256-bit keys. The encryptor is equipped with caches and we are given a service to encrypt (or decrypt) our messages. In short, there are four oracles provided by the service ($k_0$ is the fixed secret key and $b \in \\{128, 192, 256\\}$).
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HKCERT CTF 2020 Postmortem
On August 2020, @blackb6a was invited to co-organize HKCERT CTF 2020 (which is held on November 2020) as one of the challenge authors. This is a CTF for secondary and tertiary students in Hong Kong. Although I had experience preparing CTFs earlier, this is actually the first CTF officially prepared by Black Bauhinia. I have written four challenges for this CTF - Sanity Check II (Web), LF2 (Reverse), Sign In Please (Crypto) and Calm Down (Crypto). There will also be some stories behind the scenes.
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Aero CTF 2021 Writeup
This time I am playing alone for @blackb6a and had all the crypto challenges solved (and nothing else). I found the crypto challenges in many of the CTFs this year are worth-trying, and these are no exceptions. I ended up at the 9th place. By the way, @SuperGuesser is the first to solve for all of the crypto challenges. Can we nerf @RBTree_ and @rkm0959?
Read More →Union CTF 2021 (II): committee
We are given log.txt that contains the full commit history of the flag-containing repository. We are also given the content of the only file, namely flag.txt, for the first three commits. Also, three characters are filled in each subsequent commit. The objective is to recover the flag.
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