PlaidCTF 2021: Plaid Party Planning IV
This year’s edition of the Plaid Party Planning saga explores a type confusion in OCaml. The bug results from two OCaml performance optimizations interacting poorly.
This year’s edition of the Plaid Party Planning saga explores a type confusion in OCaml. The bug results from two OCaml performance optimizations interacting poorly.
In many regards, 2020 has felt like a collective Blue Screen of Death. However, a raging virus was not enough to keep DEF CON from happening. This year it booted into Safemode, an online-only version of the popular security conference. Along with it, the titular DEF CON CTF reimagined itself for a virtual future.
PlaidCTF 2020, with the theme Ready Pwner One, ran from April 17 to 19. We had a lot of very difficult problems, and all of them got solved… except for one:
At this point, it should probably come as little surprise that Catalog is one of mine; I don’t have the best record at having all of my problems solved (see: Toaster Wars Stormy Flag, idIoT: Lights). Here, I’ll discuss the intended solution to the problem, and a little behind-the-scenes look at what led me to write this problem and what I’d do differently if I had the chance to do it again.
For PlaidCTF this year, I created a demake of The Witness in Hypercard. Since most of the technology I used is over 20 years old, and a lot of the documentation seems lost to time, I created a short video that discusses how I made it, and what resources I used in order to make it happen.
About 6 months ago, I had some downtime while transitioning jobs and decided to look for a project to entertain myself with. I had previously run into Minamaxir’s GPT-2 Magic Card Generator and thought it could be quick and fun to apply that idea to a hobby of my own, Dungeons and Dragons. Such a generator could end up being a useful tool, but more likely I figured I would end up with a toy project to play with while quickly teaching myself a little more about GPT-2. Unfortunately, it didn’t end up being quite as simple as I had imagined.