If it comes to IT security and competitions, one’s first association may be the „CTF” abbreviation, which stands for „capture the flag”. These challenges should not be confused with the outdoor sport activity, other than the main goal of obtaining a „flag”, which in our case is a character string of some specified format. CTF challenges often vary in difficulty and thematics, but a similarity in all is that they heavily focus on information and data security.The greatest hacking conferences such as DEF CON or BSides usually include CTF competitions, but such competitions often take place on their own as well, like VolgaCTF or PlaidCTF.

One of the most recent ones of these challenges were organized in Hungary by the The Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS Lab) of Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

This competition, called SecChallenge - where Microsec was one of the main sponsors - was several weeks long; this is unusual for CTFs, but here so many challenges were developed that even this much time was not enough to complete all the tasks that featured cryptography, steganography, reverse engineering and hardware security among others, all done in such a quality manner as the biggest international CTF competitions.

Congratulations to the winners, as well as to CrySyS Student Core and c0r3dump for such quality work, and we encourage all students interested in the above mentioned topics to participate in next year’s competition.

https://secchallenge.crysys.hu/