Posts
Articles and guides of various topics, techniques, and so on in relation to CTF challenges.
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What Is picoCTF? Who Built It, Why, and What It Actually Teaches
picoCTF is Carnegie Mellon's free hacking competition, started in 2013 by CMU's own CTF team. Who built it, why, and what its own research changed.
August 28, 2026
osintforensicsgeneral-skillsmetadata
OSINT for CTF: How to Turn Public Data Into a Flag
OSINT for CTF: identify a CVE from a prose description, recover redacted text, geolocate from EXIF, read identity out of a pcap, and profile credentials.
August 25, 2026
general-skillsesoteric-languagesencodingreverse-engineeringdecoderbeginner
Esoteric Languages in CTF: Recognising Code That Does Not Look Like Code
Identify and run the esolangs that show up in CTF: Brainfuck, Whitespace, Rockstar, Befunge, Piet, JSFuck and Redcode, with a fingerprint table and an interpreter.
August 23, 2026
forensicspdfoffice-documentsmetadatafile-formatssteganography
Document Forensics for CTF: PDFs, Office Files, and Everything strings Misses
Pulling flags out of PDFs and Office documents: failed redaction, hidden slides, tracked changes, VBA macros, embedded objects, and why strings finds none of it.
August 21, 2026
reverse-engineeringvirtual-machinebytecodeemulationghidrabinary-analysis
Reversing Custom VMs for CTF: Find the Dispatch Loop, Write the Emulator
Recognise a hand-rolled bytecode interpreter inside a binary, recover its opcode table, write a disassembler and emulator in Python, then solve the program it runs.
August 19, 2026
web-exploitationphptype-jugglingauthentication-bypassweb-securityhash
PHP Type Juggling for CTF: Magic Hashes, Array Tricks, and What PHP 8 Broke
Loose comparison bugs in PHP, from 0e magic hashes to passing arrays into strcmp, plus which classic tricks PHP 8 killed and which ones still work in 2026.
August 17, 2026
binary-exploitationweb-exploitationrace-conditionslinuxprivilege-escalationconcurrency
Race Conditions and TOCTOU for CTF: Winning the Window Between Check and Use
How to find, widen and win race conditions in CTF: symlink TOCTOU on SUID binaries, limit-overrun bugs in web apps, signal races, and mempool front-running.
August 15, 2026
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picoCTF 2026: Every Challenge, Sorted by What It Actually Teaches
A category-by-category guide to the 70 picoCTF 2026 challenges: what changed this season, which ones teach the most, and a walkthrough link for every single one.
August 13, 2026
web-exploitationsql-injectionsqlmapdatabaseswebctf-tools
sqlmap for CTF: Every Flag That Matters, and What to Do When It Finds Nothing
A practical sqlmap workflow for CTF: request files, level and risk, technique selection, tamper scripts, second-order injection, and the failure checklist.
August 11, 2026
All posts
Every article on the site, listed alphabetically.
- AES for CTF: Read the Ciphertext, Not the Math
- Android APK Reverse Engineering for CTF: From .apk to Flag
- angr from First Principles: A picoCTF Tutorial for Beginners Tired of Magic
- Archive and Zip Password Cracking for CTF
- ARM Assembly for CTF: The ARMssembly Series
- Audio Steganography and Spectrograms for CTF Forensics
- Authentication Bypass and IDOR for CTF: The Broken Access Control Playbook
- Base64, Hex, and Common CTF Encodings Explained
- Bash Scripting for CTF Automation: Loops, Pipes, and Brute-Force Harnesses
- Beginner's Guide to Netcat for CTFs
- Buffer Overflow and Binary Exploitation for CTF
- Burp Suite for picoCTF: From Proxy Setup to Repeater Tricks
- Bypassing ASLR and PIE in CTF Binary Exploitation (picoCTF Guide)
- Classical Ciphers for CTF: Caesar, Vigenère, and Substitution
- Command Injection for CTF: From Ping Boxes to Blind Exfil
- Cookie and JWT Attacks for CTF Web Challenges (picoCTF Guide)
- CSRF for CTF: Forging Requests and Bypassing Tokens
- CTF Disk Forensics: What to Do When Strings Returns Nothing
- Diffie-Hellman and Discrete Log for CTF: Breaking Weak Key Exchanges
- Document Forensics for CTF: PDFs, Office Files, and Everything strings Misses
- Elliptic Curves for CTF: The Discrete Log Is the Whole Game
- Esoteric Languages in CTF: Recognising Code That Does Not Look Like Code
- File Carving and Magic Bytes: Repairing Corrupted Files for CTF
- File Upload Exploitation
- Format String Vulnerabilities for CTF Binary Exploitation
- Frida and Binary Instrumentation for CTFs: A Beginner's Path
- Git Forensics for CTF: What to Do When git log Returns Nothing
- Go and Rust Binary Reversing for CTF: Taming the Fat Binary
- GraphQL Exploitation for CTF: From /graphql to the Flag
- Hash Cracking for CTF: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256 and Beyond (picoCTF 2026)
- Hash Length Extension Attacks for CTF: Forging a MAC Without the Secret
- Heap Exploitation for CTF: From heap Overflow to tcache Poisoning
- How to Read and Analyze Hex Dumps
- How to Start Playing CTFs: A Complete Beginner's Guide
- How to Use Ghidra for Reverse Engineering CTF Challenges
- HTTP for CTF: Requests, Headers, Status Codes, and DevTools
- Image Metadata and EXIF Forensics for CTF
- Insecure Deserialization for CTF: Pickle, __reduce__, and RCE
- Insecure Randomness for CTF: Predicting PRNGs and the Mersenne Twister
- Integer Overflow and Signedness Bugs for CTF
- Introduction to Steganography Tools for CTF
- Java Reverse Engineering for CTF: Decompiling JARs and the Vault Door Series
- JavaScript Deobfuscation for CTF: Hook the Sink, Not the Source
- LFI for CTF: From /etc/passwd to RCE
- Linux Command Line Basics for CTF Competitions
- Linux Privilege Escalation for CTF
- Modular Arithmetic for CTF Crypto: The Math Behind RSA, DH, and ECC
- Networking Tools for CTF Challenges
- NoSQL Injection for CTF: Bypassing Login Without SQL
- OSINT for CTF: How to Turn Public Data Into a Flag
- Padding Oracle and CBC Bit-Flipping Attacks for CTF
- Patching Binaries, Cracking Crackmes, and Writing Keygens for CTF
- PHP Type Juggling for CTF: Magic Hashes, Array Tricks, and What PHP 8 Broke
- picoCTF 2026: Every Challenge, Sorted by What It Actually Teaches
- pwntools for CTF: A Foundational Guide from import to Shell
- Python for CTF: Essential Scripting Techniques
- Python Reversing for CTF: Bytecode, Frozen Binaries, and Obfuscated Scripts
- Python Sandbox Bypass for CTF: The Filter-Breaker Playbook
- Race Conditions and TOCTOU for CTF: Winning the Window Between Check and Use
- radare2 and rizin for CTF: A Beginner's Workflow
- Recipe Chain: Decode Multi-Layer CTF Encodings Without CyberChef
- ret2libc for CTF: Leaking libc and Returning to system()
- Reversing Custom Ciphers for CTF: Breaking Homebrew Encryption
- Reversing Custom VMs for CTF: Find the Dispatch Loop, Write the Emulator
- ROP Beyond ret2libc: The Gadget Ladder for CTF Exploitation
- RSA Attacks for CTF Cryptography
- Server-Side Template Injection for CTF: Detection, Gadgets, and Filter Bypass
- Setting Up a CTF Environment: WSL, Linux, Docker, and the Core Toolkit
- Side-Channel Attacks for CTF: Timing, Power, Compression, and Cache Oracles
- Smart Contract CTF: Four Bugs That Already Drained Mainnet
- SQL Injection for CTF: From Authentication Bypass to Data Extraction
- sqlmap for CTF: Every Flag That Matters, and What to Do When It Finds Nothing
- SROP and ret2dlresolve: Advanced ROP Without a libc Leak
- SSRF for CTF: From localhost Pivots to Cloud Metadata
- Stack Canary Bypass for CTF: Leak It, Brute It, or Walk Around It
- Steganography Techniques for CTF Competitions
- Stream Ciphers in CTFs: LFSR, Vigenere, and Keystream Reuse
- The Complete picoCTF Beginner's Guide: Learning Path, Tools & Every Category
- The picoCTF Binary Exploitation Roadmap: Stack to Heap to ROP
- The picoCTF Cryptography Roadmap: From Caesar to Elliptic Curves
- The picoCTF Forensics Roadmap: file, strings, and Everything After
- The picoCTF General Skills Roadmap: The Category Everything Else Rests On
- The picoCTF Reverse Engineering Roadmap: From Disassembly to Decompiler
- The picoCTF Web Exploitation Roadmap: Recon to RCE
- USB and HID PCAP Forensics for CTF: Reconstructing Keystrokes
- Use-After-Free for CTF: Dangling Pointers and tcache
- Using GDB for CTF Reverse Engineering
- Web Recon for CTF: robots.txt, Page Source, DevTools, and Hidden Endpoints
- WebAssembly Reversing for CTF: Reading WAT and Recovering Flags from .wasm
- What Is picoCTF? Who Built It, Why, and What It Actually Teaches
- What picoCTF Web Challenges Teach You About Real Bugs in Production
- When strings Won't Cut It: Volatility 3 for CTF Memory Forensics
- Windows Forensics for CTF: Event Logs, Registry Hives, BitLocker, and SMB
- Wireshark and pcap Analysis for CTF Forensics
- Writing x86-64 Shellcode for CTF: From Syscall to Shell
- x86-64 Assembly for CTF: Reading Disassembly From Scratch
- XOR for CTF: Breaking XOR Encryption Without the Key
- XSS for CTF: A Ladder from alert(1) to CSP Bypass
- XXE for CTF: XML External Entity Attacks
- z3 for CTF: Constraint Solving from Keychecks to Crypto