My Newfound love for CTFs

2025-02-09 :: 404 words :: 3 mins

The concept of CTFs has come up in my recommendations for a while but I had never tried it out assuming its for people who were really into cybersecurity. That is until last week, when the neighbouring collage of SNUC hosted a CTF contest. I partnered up with a fellow linux user in whose skills I trusted in, and we got 2nd place ¹.

This competition is where I realised that CTFs are just a competitive version of stuff I've been doing for a while on my computer. I didn't know that combing through the hexdump using xxd and trying to find text in binaries using strings would be so fun. All the greping and gdb-ing satisfied the inner hacker in me.

It was all very cool.

Right after that there was another CTF hosted by my own college, I again scored a 2nd place ². There was a fun little section where we had to jailbreak an llm to make it reveal a key info hidden in the prompt, which peaked my interest even more.

After both of these came an even bigger event in the same week, PragyanCTF hosted by a neighbouring NIT. This one was hard, as it was open to all, professionals and students, and the cash prize didn't hurt. This one was harder then the previous both, with people from all over world competing. The questions were on another difficulty level, with an additional point being that this was a 42hr competition. We stayed up till 2 am trying to solve the questions and climbing up the scoreboard. But alas right after we woke up from sleep, we went from 10th place to 38th position. I still tried to crack some of the challenges after class, especially a memorydump question, but couldn't crack it. Nevertheless, we still finished 46th among 445 teams³.

Looking back, I've now realised that compared other Computer Science competitons such as Competitive Programming, Capture the Flag events are more fun and andrenaline giving. I plan on participating in more in the future.