This year was Samurai’s third time playing Hack A Sat’s (HAS) quals round. The first time we played, we qualified for finals. Year 2, we didn’t qualify. So this year we were hoping to qualify again. I personally wasn’t super involved in the first year, and only a bit involved last year (I don’t think the weekends lined up super great for me), but I was interested to take a shot at it this year and hopefully qualify! Blazin’ Etudes was the third of a series of microblaze reversing challenges, released on the last day of the competition (Sunday).
Continue reading →This weekend, Samurai played the DEF CON CTF Qualifier event. We had a great time playing; much thanks to the organizers for putting on a great event! Many thanks to my teammates, it was awesome playing with you all! One of the challenges this weekend was called baby-a-fallen-lap-ray
. It was categorized as a pwn
challenge, and it made a comment about being ‘the return of the parallel machine (or is it?)’.
I had the opportunity to compete in the CSAW CTF Finals 2018 for a second year in a row, with the UMBC Cyber Dawgs. It was a lot of fun, despite our somewhat lackluster finish in 10th place. I learned a lot. For instance, in this challenge, I learned how to exploit a Use-After-Free vulnerability (in WebAssembly no doubt!).
Continue reading →I recently had the opportunity to compete in the CSAW CTF Finals with the UMBC Cyber Dawgs. It was an amazing competition; the organizers were awesome and did a great job. We placed 7th in North America, by the way :) If you’ve never heard of CSAW before, it’s a huge student-run security conference/competition. We played in the CTF, or capture-the-flag competition. I would consider one of the best undergraduate-level CTF competitions. CSAW CTF is a jeopardy style competition in which you have a board of challenges, and you get points for solving them. You solve the challenge by hacking at it until it gives you a flag of the form flag{th1s_i5_a_f1@g}
, which you enter into the scoreboard to receive points. Team with the most points wins.
So if you’re here, you’re probably one of three types of people. Most likely is that I sent you here because you were wondering why the heck I mentioned this on social media. It’s also possible that you actually care about why I generated a GPG key. I happen to like my explanation, and I hope you do too :) Additionally, in the unlikely case that you just want my key, you can find it at the bottom of the post.
Continue reading →So I wrote a blog post about my process of creating my March Madness bracket last year, so I figure this year I’ll revisit it and explain what I changed. (Note: I know this post is actually after March Madness started… but I’ve been busy. I did actually create the bracket before the games began.) I used Coder’s Bracket again for a couple reasons. First, it was pretty cool last year, and I wanted to try it again.
Continue reading →Recently I had the privilege of speaking as valedictorian at my graduation from Mount Airy Christian Academy. I had so many people ask me for a copy of it, that I decided to post it here. I hope this helps someone. (If you are from MACA, please email/message/whatever me if you want a copy of the video. I’m not publishing the link publicly here.) As a final note to my class, I meant what I said.
Continue reading →I’m just okay at picking basketball brackets. I usually finish somewhere in the upper third of the pack, IIRC. However, it’s interesting to enter a bracket and watch the results come in (I almost never watch the games), so I usually make a bracket. This year, I decided to use Coder’s Bracket to create my bracket.
Continue reading →As I thought about setting up my website and email, I wanted to have a way to give out disposable email addresses. That way, I can give Widget Co an email address unique to them, and I can know if they sell my email because I will get emails from Sprockets Inc. at my address for Widget Co. In that case, I can trash all email sent to that address, eliminating that spam.
Continue reading →Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
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