What I Learnt From Competing in PicoCTF 2018

In this blog post, I want to share my thoughts on competing in a live CTF for the first time. The event was Pico CTF hosted online and created by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Cybersecurity and the world number two CTF team currently at the time of writing Plaid Parliament of Pwning (PPP).

It is an engaging event with a series of different challenges. That on progression push you out your comfort zone just enough for you to have to research and learn new tools and techniques to capture the flag and earn points. I spent most of the weekend engaged in the CTF as a solo team. Doing so, I learned a ton about steganography, Linux tools and different forms of cryptography. These areas were the most fun for me to delve into as I only had a basic understanding of the concept and never spent time looking into them or actively doing side projects related to these sections.

During the CTF I used kali-Linux tools, Foremost and Binwalk for file carving analysis, ExifTool and stegSolve for image analysis and the events integrated web terminal to complete the general Linux command line. In the challenges I learned the benefit of using the man pages, strings, grep and pipe command to search for and find specific words and strings within files with and without names. The strings command was especially useful as I now use it a lot when learning about static analysis of malicious software.

Overall, I had a blast playing it and am looking forward to next year’s challenges. To improve my chances in the next CTF I compete in, I will be working on my binary and reverse engineering skills over the following year as this is the section, I was quite interested in but lacked the knowledge for the contest. Finishing in the top 2000 out of the 40,000 or more was quite pleasing. Hopefully, I can achieve a top 1000 next year.