PicoCTF 2021 Writeup

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 March 16th, 2021 and March 30th, 2021, I placed 25 out of 2280 (top 1.1%) among US Middle/High School students (who solved at least one challenge) as a solo player with a score of 5440 points. 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. Additionally, there are many challenges that I have not solved yet. I plan to complete them soon.

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/HHousen/PicoCTF-2021

Project link: https://picoctf2021.haydenhousen.com/