General Discussions

You will need the attached QR codes to complete this.

Description: You have bypassed the physical hardware restrictions and secured the initial foothold. Now, you must escalate your privileges to absolute control.

Hidden in the physical environment are five sequential data drops in the form of QR codes. A standard smartphone scan will yield a Base64 string, but that is merely an encoding wrapper. The true payloads are heavily encrypted.

You must establish an air gap protocol to transfer this data to your terminal. Your cipher is AES-256-CBC with PBKDF2. The payload from the first drop will contain the passphrase to decrypt the second, chaining all the way to the final target.

Find the drops, decode the wrappers, decrypt the network daemons, and claim root access.

Points: 200

You will need the disk image from this link: jumpman-ctf.d64

Description: You have extracted the target's identity, but static analysis is only half the battle. Your next objective is execution. Using the physical Commodore 64, load the executable into memory, connect the peripheral hardware, and successfully initiate a game of Jumpman. Be warned: 1980s hardware engineering did not always follow modern logical standards. Trust the machine, not your instincts.

Get Jumpman moving and we will give you the flag.

Points: 100

This is the next challenge. You will need a C64 (or emulator) to mount the disk image to do this (and the JUMPMAN) challenge.

Link for disk image: jumpman-ctf.d64

Description: Step back into the 8-bit era. Your target is a physical Commodore 64. On the provided floppy disk, locate the program named "STARTHERE" and look under the hood—the flag is buried within its source code. Modern OS commands will not work here; you will need to speak the machine's native language to pull the directory and extract the flag.

Points: 50

Most of you have seen my posts on either the Basement or DarkForce about the challenges I developed for the upcoming CTF (capture the Flag) we are hosting for our students. I thought I would share them here, to give you more than what I can put on the BBS.

If you want any hints for any of the posted challenges, drop me a message and I will send one. There are at least ONE hint per challenge, but it will cost you in points. :)

The first one I will share is "The Digital Dead Drop"

Description: We intercepted a suspicious image file circulating on a local USB drive. On the surface, it looks like a completely standard photograph, but our analysts suspect it is being used to smuggle data past the perimeter firewall.

You do not need to crack complex encryption or reverse-engineer advanced cryptography for this one.…