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Quals 2008 Comes To A Close... (a week late)

Well my friends, CTF Quals 2008 has officially past, and what a wild ride it was. I'm barely awake this morning, not fully recovered from the weekend... but I'm sure some of that has to do with the incredible Paintball-Bachelor party I was called upon to make happen on Saturday. Yes, my team had to do without me for about 12 hours of the competition. I'm the best man, what could I do? Thankfully I have a brilliant team and a very strong co-captain. Even without me, they had to pull back a bit to avoid directing the game. You see, as last-year's CTF winners, we don't have to qualify (place in the top 7 teams), and feel a little awkward about choosing categories which could make or break other teams.

Intro to Quals
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon that is Quals, each year Kenshoto, a terribly cool bunch o' hacker puts on the Defcon Capture-the-Flag hacking contest, but to get into the contest your team has to qualify. Quals (ctf Qualifier round) typically takes place a week or two after Memorial-day, and is a Jeopardy-like game with five categories with five challenges each providing from 100-500 points (no, there's no Double-Quals entry where you get to choose how many points to gain/lose). Unlike Jeopardy, in recent years Quals doesn't reduce points for wrong answers, and while each team somewhat chooses their own pace, you can only select challenges that are "available". The team who answers the newest challenge first gets to choose the next challenge, making it available to the rest of the teams. Quals has always been an excellent training-ground, and a worthy game in and of itself. In fact, Quals in 2005 was my entry and training-grounds for hard-core binary hacking.

If you remember last year, all the leading teams made it through all but one of the challenges, and it was the Binary Leetness 500 point challenge. It was insane and incredible, and worthy of spending our time. This year was a bit more of everything (except web-hacking, but more on that in a minute). The only down-side I ran into this year was BinLeet300, a challenge which I feel could have been better scoped or something. The question was "What libc function is this?" and we were given 57-bytes of binary which converted into basically a spinlock and a strlen. The question lead me to believe that I got to see the whole function, although I have heard the answer was inet_aton. what?

However, that's a minor complaint, whereas the whole rest of the game was amazing. First off, let me just pay homage to kenshoto's ability to keep the game stable!

Forensics 500 was quite the challenge, being an image of Kenshoto's logo, requiring conversion to another format and then analysis of the colors to identify an undisclosed form of stego.

BinLeet400 was a BSD kernel module which replaced much of the kernel call-table (yes, rootkit-style) with pass-through wrapper versions.

My favorite of the whole game was RealWorld300, a telnet-based D&D style game. Enter your name, hack your way through (literally, but the game was an RPG about hacking), and if you win, you find yourself the proud recipient of a format string exception. Through that FSE, you have to figure out what address to overwrite and what to overwrite it with. Thankfully, the FSE is great for stack-based recon. Read the write-up on http://nopsr.us to find our nifty stack-address-math-magic. Very fun, and I think the best part was getting to hack along-side drb most of the time. He's a brilliant friend, but we always seem to be working on separate tasks.

One interesting thing was the loss of the WebHacking category. I feel it is a loss indeed, as this is where most vulns are found these days... however, with the inclusion of RealWorld, I think the game was better this way.

Sk3wl0fr00t did not qual this year... perhaps sk3wlmast3r had a Bachelor party to attend as I did. I don't know what happened for them this year, however this is a great example of how different quals are from ctf (not that I'm complaining, they're both amazing). I'm sure that someone will drop out and that this ctf-titan will once again be making the competition difficult for all of us.

Shellphish was among the teams to qualify for ctf. Proven to be powerful in the past, this former-ctf-champion failed to qualify last year for whatever reason. Lead by Giovanni Vigna, Shellphish will make the competition interesting to say the least.

For those with a pair, check out the Quals write-ups over at http://nopsr.us

Yes I'm Hacking Fun Now.
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