Category: CTF

Reverse Engineering – First Try

For me this experience was an epic failure, but that’s most definitely because I know absolutely nothing about Reverse Engineering. My frustrations were enhanced by the fact that my entry key was buried in my spam/trash folder and I didn’t think to look in there until an hour before the CTF was scheduled to end. In all honesty this wasn’t my first time signing up for this CTF, but during 1.0 I had to work so only got the bonus membership to Escalate afterwards and never got to touch the platform.

As I stated I know nothing about Reverse Engineering…well, I wouldn’t say nothing. I know the names of some of the tools, namely Ghidra and BinaryNinja, but I’ve never used either. |

I’m trying to leave myself completely open to learning though, which also means participating in as many CTFs as I can schedule. This is a subplot plan that has me trying to get the hands-on experience from anywhere. So, knowing nothing I signed up for this one.

As I state above the problems were mostly caused by me and my email address. I got a little hands-on usage of Binary Ninja to complete simple tasks, but I would have needed way longer than an hour to get anywhere with the medium and hard tasks. I think maybe in the hour I was able to score something like 72 points.

The pro of doing this is that I realized that somethings aren’t that difficult to do when in comes to reverse engineering. I mean this doesn’t make me any sort of expert, nor would I put this on my resume (other than to demonstrate my willingness to learn new tools). I think that it did make me interested in knowing more about reverse engineering. I would like for when 3.0 comes around I score at least 100 points (that was actually my lofty goal this time). The gist is that I’m not going to just stop participating because right now I’m not as knowledgeable.