Many of our engineers at Security Innovation regularly participate in CTF competitions and, as anyone that has played CTF in the past several years knows, the challenges are both relevant and difficult. This year the cryptography challenges have ranged from Wiener's attack against RSA to cracking the knapsack problem with Lenstra, Lenstra, and Lovasz's algorithm and exploits routinely require Return-Oriented Programming (ROP). Because knowing where to start can be its own challenge, Tom Samstag and myself gave a talk at the University of Washington outlining the most common tools used during CTF competitions. We covered a wide range of topics including optimizing your GDB work flow, useful python libraries, bash one-liners, and why you should never forget about /proc. The slides can be found on our Github page.
