General Skills
Before you can specialize in any CTF category, you need a solid foundation: connecting to remote services, navigating Linux, understanding number systems, and using git. These are the skills every category takes for granted. Work through this path first if you're new to CTFs or want to fill in any gaps.
Guides for this path
Read these alongside the challenges below. The first one orients you; the rest go deeper on the techniques each step needs.
- The picoCTF General Skills Roadmap: The Category Everything Else Rests OnGeneral Skills roadmap for picoCTF: a tiered path through the shell, file inspection, encodings, scripting, remote services, git, and permissions.
- Linux Command Line Basics for CTF CompetitionsLinux CLI for CTF beginners: file inspection, text searching, permissions, base64 decoding, and ssh, with examples from real picoCTF General Skills challenges.
- Beginner's Guide to Netcat for CTFsNetcat (nc) for CTF: connect to challenge servers, pipe payloads, automate with Python pwntools, and read challenge output, a beginner-friendly guide.
- How to Read and Analyze Hex DumpsHex dumps for CTF: read the xxd format, spot magic bytes, find hidden strings, and use hex editors to inspect binary files, with practical forensics examples.
- Git Forensics for CTF: What to Do When git log Returns NothingRun git log --all -p first. If that comes back empty, the flag is in one of seven other places git never actually deletes. Here is the full map.
- Bash Scripting for CTF Automation: Loops, Pipes, and Brute-Force HarnessesBash scripting for CTF automation: brute-force loops, curl and nc fuzzers, grep/awk/sed filtering, xargs parallelism, and a reusable solve.sh you can copy.
- Step 01
Linux and Remote Access
CTF challenges almost always involve a Linux terminal. SSH lets you connect to remote servers where challenges live. Learning the basic shell commands - ls, cat, grep, file, chmod - is the single most important prerequisite for every other category. Super SSH is the perfect starting point.
- Step 02
Number Systems
Binary, hexadecimal, and octal are the number systems that underpin all of computing. Knowing how to convert between them by hand, and understanding how bytes are ordered (endianness), is essential for interpreting raw data. The binhexa challenge is a rapid-fire drill across all the conversions you need.
- Step 03
Git and Version Control
Git stores the entire history of a repository, which means accidentally committed secrets live forever in the log. These four challenges simulate the common real-world scenario of sensitive data ending up in version control. You'll use git log, git diff, git stash, and git branch to hunt down flags.
- Step 04
Scripting and Automation
Sometimes the only way to solve a challenge is to automate it: sending thousands of requests, brute-forcing a PIN, or parsing gigabytes of output. Learning to write Python or bash scripts that interact with programs via pwntools or subprocess is what separates fast solvers from slow ones.