Down to the Wire

Toaster Week Part 4: TW2.5 Blazing Flag

It occurred to me about a month ago that I never published author writeups for the “Toaster Wars: Going Rogue” CTF problems from PicoCTF 2017 and PlaidCTF 2017, which is particularly troubling since one of them wasn’t actually solved in contest! To remedy this, and in celebration of the release of a new game in the series that inspired these problems later this week, I’ll be posting writeups for all of the Toaster Wars problems over the course of the week.

For day four, I’ll be talking about the Blazing Flag from PlaidCTF 2017.

Toaster Week Part 3: TW2.5 Light Flag

It occurred to me about a month ago that I never published author writeups for the “Toaster Wars: Going Rogue” CTF problems from PicoCTF 2017 and PlaidCTF 2017, which is particularly troubling since one of them wasn’t actually solved in contest! To remedy this, and in celebration of the release of a new game in the series that inspired these problems later this week, I’ll be posting writeups for all of the Toaster Wars problems over the course of the week.

For day three, I’ll be covering the first of the three Toaster Wars problems from PlaidCTF 2017: the Light Flag.

Toaster Week Part 2: TW_GR_E3_GtI and TW_GR_E4_STW

It occurred to me about a month ago that I never published author writeups for the “Toaster Wars: Going Rogue” CTF problems from PicoCTF 2017 and PlaidCTF 2017, which is particularly troubling since one of them wasn’t actually solved in contest! To remedy this, and in celebration of the release of a new game in the series that inspired these problems later this week, I’ll be posting writeups for all of the Toaster Wars problems over the course of the week.

For day two, I’ll be talking about the harder Toaster Wars problems from PicoCTF 2017: TW_GR_E3_GtI and TW_GR_E4_STW.

Toaster Week Part 1: TW_GR_E1_ART and TW_GR_E2_EoTDS

It occurred to me about a month ago that I never published author writeups for the “Toaster Wars: Going Rogue” CTF problems from PicoCTF 2017 and PlaidCTF 2017, which is particularly troubling since one of them wasn’t actually solved in contest! To remedy this, and in celebration of the release of a new game in the series that inspired these problems later this week, I’ll be posting writeups for all of the Toaster Wars problems over the course of the week.

I’ll be going in order, so to start off, today I’ll be talking about the first the first two problems from PicoCTF 2017: TW_GR_E1_ART and TW_GR_E2_EoTDS.

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

With 30,000,000 weekly downloads, it’s reasonable to expect that qs has been written from the ground up to be efficient, secure, and robust. Unfortunately, as is often the case with small projects that become unexpectedly big, it is plagued by legacy options and sibylline code. Without understanding how it really works, it is incredibly difficult to use safely.