As promised, we are releasing the source code for the X-CTF badge, about 1 month after the event to give interested participants the chance to take a crack at it. If you are interested in the badge design process, check out my previous post on the hardware aspects.

Jeremias and Jeremy gave a talk at one of the Null Security meetups. Check out the slides if you haven’t already. In one part, Jeremy talks about the custom firmware he wrote for his badge and the additional challenges he set up for partipants to get more points. The 2nd part of the talk covers the electronic badge and challenges.

The Challenges

The challenges try to exploit the nature of being a self-contained electronic device. Rather than trying to replicate more CTF puzzles and simply placing them into the badge, we specially designed them for the badge.

You can find the answers to the badge puzzles (and the main CTF puzzles) in the X-CTF GitHub repo, which was released shortly after the event.

Since there’s only a single entry point into the set of challenges (meaning you must solve each puzzle before getting to the next), the puzzles must be designed with increasing levels of difficulty; too difficult and the participants will totally give up.

Stage 1: Catch Me If You Can

I particularly like this one. Unlike a program running on the computer, you can’t easily snapshot the state of the program, nor try to influence (slow down) its execution.

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