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 15th, 2022 and March 29th, 2022, I placed 248th out of 7794 (top 3.2%) among global participants (who solved at least one challenge) as a solo player with a score of 12,000 points. All of my writeups (containing solutions and explanations) can be found in the github repo.
I only wrote writeups for challenges that I couldn’t solve in a few minutes. For example, many of the easier/straightforward challenges do not have a corresponding writeup. Additionally, writeups were written such that they would be the most useful to my future self. Thus, easier challenge writeups may contain relatively little information.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/HHousen/PicoCTF-2022
Project link: https://picoctf2022.haydenhousen.com/