Click here to view my writeups
“picoCTF is a free computer security game targeted at middle and high school students, created by security experts at Carnegie Mellon University. The game consists of a series of challenges centered around a unique storyline where participants must reverse engineer, break, hack, decrypt, or do whatever it takes to solve the challenge. The challenges are all set up with the intent of being hacked, making it an excellent, legal way to get hands-on experience.” — PicoCTF.com
I learned ethical hacking skills including cryptography, binary exploitation, forensics, reverse engineering, and web exploitation.
During the competition period, which was held between September 27, 2019 and October 11, 2019, I placed 609 out of 15817 with a score of 13,900 points. Since then I have completed all 121 challenges, achieved the max score of 34,201 points, and reached rank 39 out of nearly 100,000 participants. All of my writeups (containing solutions and explanations) can be found in the github repo.
Not every challenge has a corresponding writeup. I did not do any writeups for any of the challenges in the “General Skills” category since they were mostly for beginners. I also left out many of the beginner-level challenges in other categories. All of the most difficult challenges with the fewest solves have a writeup.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/HHousen/PicoCTF-2019
Project link: https://picoctf2019.haydenhousen.com/