This is my write-up for the 2022 Hackvent on hacking-lab.com. Hackvent is a remote, public and free-to-play jeopardy-style CTF. Each day during advent, one challenge gets released. As christmas approaches, the difficulty of every new challenge increases by a bit. You can read more about it here.
Hackvent is organised by Compass Security and many volunteers contributing challenges and maintaining infrastructure for things to work smoothly.
I want to thank everyone involved for letting me learn and discover new fields and unknown corners of already explored areas. Thanks a lot kuyaya for keeping challenges stable and hackers engaged.
This time, I approached especially the web3 challenges as a purely educational exercise, but still with a goal of solving them all. With this, I mainly wanted to aquire more knowledge in this - from my perspective - yet unmapped territory. Many thanks to HaCk0 for your challenges and to mcia for helping me getting unstuck many times. I learned a ton of new stuff thanks to you.
Further credits go to all the challenge creators for the awesome challenges and of course to all the hackers for solving them (especially the ones where I gave up from the outset).
Finally, I want to thank my family as this was again another layer on top of an already busy December.
This year, I missed a few "24h deadlines" and didn't solve day 21 and day 24, landing on the 17th place of the ranking.
All the solved challenges are documented in differing degrees of detail hereafter.
Happy reading,
-ludus
Challenge descriptions and source material was taken from Hacking-lab.com with the permission of the organisers and authors of challenges.