CyberFire Puzzles Fall 2020 Report

Cyber Fire Puzzles (Fall 2020) is over! We want to thank everyone who participated in the event, and we hope that you enjoyed and learned from the experience. Below is a brief write-up of the event that includes the total number of participants, a list of the teams and their placement in the event, a list of the topics, and some nice graphs of the results from the event.

If you participated in the event and would like to include write-ups of some of the challenges, please feel free to reach out to one of the admins. We would love to see how you solved the problem and include it on the website (if you would like).

Introduction

Cyber Fire Puzzles (Fall 2020) ended August 23rd at 7 PM CDT. The event went well with 58 total applicants, 49 of which were undergraduate students, 8 graduate students and 1 alumni.

The primary form of communication for the participants was in the Cyber Fire Puzzles Slack channel and the AUEHC Discord channel (please refer to our previous post for more information).

Teams

11 Teams participated in the event. The following is a list of the teams in the order of their placement in the competition:

1. undecided
2. BRUH
3. Team 404 Not Found
4. generic team name
5. Nero
6. Grumpy Old Men
7. the lucky crunchers
8. DemonXBunny
9. coom
10. mercury
11. hallo

Topics

• base:

Decode a custom base alphabet from base 2 to base 1337.

• byobf:

Build a script to bruteforce the hash of the challenge page.

• codebreaking:

A variety of cryptography problems.

• hostforensics:

Delve into memory forensics for a Windows system.

• netarch:

Learn custom protocol and encryption routines.

• nocode

CTF challenges that do not require a computer, just a pad of paper, a pencil, and a calculator.

• reverse:

Reverse engineer binaries to figure out a secret message.

• steg:

Find the hidden message within a normal looking file.

• wopr:

Break into a mainframe system.

Results