SecuRT 2015 Retrospective

Published on Monday, 16 March 2015 in Security ; tagged with security, ctf, challenges, securt, tous, pirates ; text version

SecuRT third edition took place last Saturday in Montbéliard. It is a special event that tries to raise awareness about security in computer sciences among students. During the first edition, I participated to their CTF, with jvoisin and rboissat under the name of HackGyver, where we finished first!

SecuRT 2015 CTF

Since last year, we decided to organize the challenges for their competition and last week-end, we provided more than 40 different challenges. Now that the event is over, I wanted to review some details here.

I will only speak about the part futex, jvoisin and I contributed to. The fact that the communication about the event was incomplete, that the website is ugly or that the new name is lame will not be covered.

The Bad

Unsecure Setup

I want to thanks the participants! Because they were nice enough to not break the setup.

We had set up three different virtual machines for the CTF. One for the exploits, one for the web challenges and one for the scoreboard. It could have been enough for such small competition except that we had some web challenges that were hazardous.

In both cases, the students could have read the flags from the other web challenges without even reading the subjects.
We knew that. We did not do anything against that. We sucked.

Next year, we will configure one VM for each hazardous challenge (we will need better hardware though) for better isolation.

Broken challenges

More than 40 different challenges were provided for the CTF. Truth be told, most of them were written in the past two weeks.

We spent some times to test each of them and we noted a couple of things to update right before starting for the CTF. Of course we forgot some of them...

Another aspect that bothered me is that some challenges could be solved using automated tools only. Script kiddies would have been able to solve some challenges like the SQLi using sqlmap, the Format String one thanks to RedSpin and others... But we thought that because the participants are mostly beginners, it would not be a problem. IMO next year, we should think about that and make it hard for these tools to work.

Gap between challengers

There was 8 teams that participated to the CTF and most of them never did anything related to security. I tried my best to help the beginners, giving them advices, showing them some tools, being their rubber duck and some times spoiling a little bit too much :p

I was glad that most of the Web and SQLi challenges were validated but still surprised that the Reverse Engineering category was not even checked...

Validation of the challenges

The RE category had the most challenges and some were really simple. I know that the participants most probably never tried some reverse stuff but come on...

Lame challenges

Last point I want to cover is that some challenges were lame... With more that 40 challenges, it is hard to have each of them being fun and interesting.

The Good

Most challenges were validated

To be precise, we provided 44 challenges for this third SecuRT edition. Among them, 32 challenges were validated at least once, which makes it ~73%!

Details of the validated challenges

As explained earlier, most of the validated challenges were the web and the SQLi ones. Being come the crypto and the lock-picking ones. As seen last year, the lock-picking ones were really appreciated by the challengers; it is always fun to have the opportunity to unlock some real locks :)

Good duration

A few days before the event, we asked to have 7 hours allocated for the CTF instead of 4. With 40 challenges, we really thought that 4 hours would not be enough and we were right. First we asked for 12 hours but we were afraid to lose the challengers' focus before the end and we were right again.

IMO 7 hours was almost perfect. On the dark side, we saw a lot of people leaving early but I think that was because we should have extended the duration way earlier. People already had plans for the evening. On the bright side, most of the challenges were validated and the ones who stayed said that they had fun.

I hope that next year, we will do what has been said during event, meaning two days for the SecuRT:

I am waiting to see what can be done!

People had fun

Walking around during and after the CTF, I feel that the challengers had fun. I realized that most of them had a hard time just to validate the first web challenge but with some little help, they felt like pwning some stuff :p

I am quite sure that we indeed raised awareness among them, especially with some challenges seen in the wild not so long ago. In my opinion, the SecuRT CTF went fine.

Scoreboard

SecuRT 2015 Scoreboard

Thanks to all participants! We hope to see you next year for even better challenges! Feel free to stop by the hackerspace :p


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