Blue Water CTF 2024
My first real taste of making an impact at a major CTF, ending with a second-place team finish and a three-solve reversing challenge.
Blue Water CTF 2024 was one of my first experiences where I felt that I had made a meaningful contribution at a major CTF. That alone made the event incredibly exciting for me.
The highlight was solving OORM, a difficult reversing challenge that ended with only three solves. Getting through it felt especially rewarding, and it gave me some confidence that I could hold my own against strong competition.
Of course, our second-place finish was very much a team effort. Everyone on CyKor played extremely well throughout the event, and I was happy that I managed to do my part along the way.
CyKor finished the event in second place overall.
Below are my write-ups for the two reversing challenges I solved during the event:
Write-ups
maybe Checker
A flag checker split across 60 small functions. I translated the constraints by hand and used Z3 to recover the flag.
OORM
A three-solve reversing challenge built around a heavily unrolled verification routine. This write-up covers the program structure, code parsing, and automated flag recovery.