Newport Blake CTF 2023

Overall Placement: #29/451
High School Placement: #8/39

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Thoughts:

First high school CTF!

Overall, I think I did quite well with this CTF! However, I definitely had some major problems with spending far too long on problems that could have taken only 30 minutes max. cough cough webcam and Shifty Sands cough cough. I also missed galleria because I didn’t include a single / D:

I think I could have done better, and I am honestly a little disappointed considering this is probably the most time I have ever spent on a single CTF. My key takeaways are:

1. I am not good at pwn… I need to learn some basic ROP and heap at the very least.

2. Don’t spend too long on a single challenge. Linkedout 2 (I still hate that challenge) and webcam killed my brain Saturday and Sunday.

3. Take breaks! Related to the previous one, but it’s not good to just keep going at a challenge without any progress. It destroys my mental :(

Writeups

• Gym
  [438] <algo/> <greedy/>
• 32+32=64
  [100] <crypto/> <base64/>
• Caesar Salads
  [100] <crypto/> <caesar/>
• Rivest Shamir Forgot Adleman
  [349] <crypto/> <rsa/> <broken-rsa/>
• Sbg Abw's Insanity
  [432] <crypto/> <rsa/>
• Do You Hear That
  [241] <misc/> <forensics/> <audio-forensics/>
• Not Accepted
  [365] <misc/> <codeforces/>
• Babbling About
  [401] <osint/> <babel/>
• Linkedout 1
  [352] <osint/> <hex/>
• Linkedout 3
  [420] <osint/> <hex/>
• Persona
  [261] <osint/> <wayback-machine/>
• Webcam
  [429] <osint/> <google-maps/>
• Crisscross
  [446] <rev/> <bits/>
• Itchy Scratchy
  [464] <rev/> <Scratch/> <brute-force/>
• Shifty Sands
  [476] <rev/> <maze/>
• Inspector Gadget
  [100] <web/> <inspect/>
• Secret Tunnel
  [264] <web/> <localhost/> <url-encoding/>
• Walter's Crystal Shop
  [241] <web/> <SQLi/> <sql-union/>