Category Archive

This past weekend I attended to fiberparty the days 27, 28, 29 an event held at Poliesportiu Campus Nord where about two hundred people meet to enjoy almost every field of computing from gaming and moding to coding and security. It had a pretty interesting activities schedule, games tournaments, talks, a coding challenges and the one I was most interested in, the security challenge.

The challenge consisted in 8+1 levels, level0 a very basic one and the 8 remaining levels. The challenge was a mix of web hacking, crypto, coding and stegano. First I started leading doing solo till level 4, at level 5 someone passed me it was Sec0 a group around 5 guys which came to be our main opponent, and when I say our it’s cause I merged with graz and SaLeM in order to compete against them since they together were faster than us doing solo. It was a healthy competition in which since level 5 Sec0 was leading until they reached level 7 where they got stuck and we could draw them. Here starts the real competition one level left, the hardest one, and we both at the same point, the game developer laughing, you can imagine the tension in the air, we progress a bit, they also do, we still progress a bit more, the also do, damn it they’re breathing in our necks…

Finally we won just by seconds! It was an interesting competition with really good opponents whom I’m glad we had, in fact if I had to decide who won the challenge I would say it was a draw

For us who like computers there’s something called wargames. A wargame is a set of challenges usually organized by different difficulty levels in where you have to solve as many challs as possible just for the fact of fun. It’s a good way to spend your spare time (if you have) and it also helps you to check your knowledge and learn new things apart of improving your analytical skills.

Wargaming sites tend to have different types of challenges in, some are exclusively dedicated to one kind of challange. There are different kinds of challanges:

• Web and shell based ones may be the most interesting from my point of view since this are the ones that look more realistic. In this you either break into some restricted area, check for some admin slovenliness, etc (web) or have to scale privileges exploiting some bugged programs launched by users with higher privileges (shell).
• At cryptography ones as you might guess you’re given a cryptogram, sometimes few hints, and you just have to guess the ciphering method, decrypt it and find the “secret word/message”.
• Coding challenges consist of an enunciate describing you an algorithm/process and you have to code a tool that does it. Several coding challenges sites check the efficiency of the algorithm by checking the time elapsed and the resources used.
• Steganography challenges consist of a file, usually an image, in which like cryptograms you have to find secret words/messages. This tend to be harder than cryptograms it’s recommended to have some hex editors around.
• I think it’s quite obvious what you have to do with Cracking ones, you have to crack or reverse engineer the binary in order to get the algorithm that makes the keys valid then get the magic word, code a keygen, a patch, etc, that depends.

Often wargaming sites include logic and science games as a complement for the other challenges. Some others also include tests where you can check your knowledge and might also improve your gathering skills.

This is a list of the wargames I used to play, I play or ever planned to:

http://yoire.com
http://bright-shadows.net
http://intruded.net
http://quiz.ngsec.com
http://hackquest.de
http://pulltheplug.org
http://osix.net
http://www.programming-challenges.com
http://smashthestack.org
http://mathschallenge.net