CTF-Writeups

CTF Challenges I Created

Custom CTF challenges designed to test various cybersecurity skills.

Challenges

🎵 Music Box v2

Category: Misc / Steganography
Difficulty: Medium-Hard

A multi-layered puzzle involving hidden hex blobs, XOR encoding, spectrogram analysis, Morse code, corrupted images, and AES decryption.

View Writeup Download Challenge

🎅 Naughty or Nice

Category: Web / GraphQL
Difficulty: Easy-Medium

Exploit GraphQL vulnerabilities to access Santa’s protected data. Features introspection discovery, authorization bypass, and batch query attacks.

View Writeup Download Challenge

⛏️ ANormalJourney

Category: Minecraft / Forensics / OSINT
Difficulty: Medium

A Minecraft world forensics puzzle. Recover the creator’s last logout position from NBT data, decode Base64 clues hidden in books, use bedrock pattern matching to locate the final flag stash.

View Writeup Download Challenge

📡 Lines of Contact

Category: Signal Processing / Misc
Difficulty: Hard

Decode a deep-space audio transmission hiding raster images. Detect sync pulses in a WAV file, extract scanlines, and reconstruct hidden pictures — Golden Record style.

View Writeup Download Challenge

🔍 Pixel Rehab

Category: Forensics
Difficulty: Medium

A corrupted PNG with a hidden 7z archive appended after the IEND chunk. Fix the signature byte, parse PNG chunks to find the trailer, swap the magic bytes, and extract the real flag.

View Writeup Download Challenge

Skyglyph I: Guide Star

Category: Misc
Difficulty: Easy

A star-tracker calibration puzzle. Use labeled guide stars to fit a camera model with radial distortion, then invert it to map all detections back to sky coordinates. The brightest stars spell a hidden message.

View Writeup Download Challenge

🌌 Skyglyph II: Blind Drift

Category: Misc / Crypto / Forensics
Difficulty: Very Hard

Blind plate-solve 4 noisy star frames against a catalog, extract matching star IDs, derive per-frame ChaCha20-Poly1305 keys, and decrypt flag parts. AEAD authentication enforces perfect correctness.

View Writeup Download Challenge

🗺️ Temptation. Stone. Silence.

Category: OSINT
Difficulty: Medium

Three images, three fragments — each pointing to a Latvian place. Use reverse image search, identify carved faces, and trace devil folklore to pinpoint three locations with proper Latvian diacritics.

View Writeup Download Challenge

🎮 Where’s Franklin?

Category: OSINT / GTA V
Difficulty: Easy

A GTA V geolocation challenge. Given a screenshot of Franklin standing next to a road, identify the exact in-game location using database lookups or manual map exploration.

View Writeup Download Challenge

← Back to Blog