If you’re participating in CTCTF this week, I know it has been a hard week, and I have a huge apology to make, about several things.

I should not have helped out with this CTF. I didn’t have much time to work on it, I was busy with school, and it really wasn’t a good time for me to be doing it. However, I was really stupid so I decided to jump in anyway.

If you’re in a rush, and you don’t care about all this stuff, skip down to the bottom for the final hint.

Backend

The website backend problems were completely my fault. Things like the problems page saying your problem was unsolved when you actually received points for it, or not being able to submit answers for problems because it said “You’ve already tried this.” Part of this was not havingenough time to thoroughly test the server and catch all the problems.

IRC

This really isn’t my problem. But I’ll address it anyway. The biggest problem was the choice of using Pdgn server. It works well for its purpose, and does serve all its values. But it was too underdeveloped to use in an actual CTF, lacking features including:

  • Authentication — people just stole other people’s usernames.
  • Operators — we lost all ops in the original channel and the new channel.
  • Connection issues—we got lots of ECONNRESET issues with KiwiIRC.

Problems

I don’t know what to say about this. I urged the other team members to shorten the duration of the competition to 3 days, but they wouldn’t budge, so we ended up having a 7-day competition with only 20 easy problems. My friend said he solved all but 2 of them in an hour.

We weren’t even going to use 1023megabytes originally. But because of the immediate lack of problems, I figured we would need it.

When the competition started, there were only 18 questions up. I wrote “3 hard 3 me” in about 15 minutes during class. If you’re running a competition, you’d want to keep your participants’ interests as long as possible; there’s no point if everyone quits after a day — which is basically what happened.

I figured the purpose of creating such an insanely BS problem was to keep people interested in the CTF, but also to keep the mods (who are on the verge of quitting) motivated to keep going. I originally planned to give a lot of hints, and here is the last one.

Hints

This is the final hint for “3 hard 3 me”: base 16, base 2, base 3.

For 1023megabytes, you probably already made some connection between me and a group called the Donut Mafia. Try to find our fundraising website, and the flag will be on a userpage.

I feel like I owe this to everyone for a bad competition and hope you forgive me for all these mistakes. They won’t happen again. I guess I’ll see you guys at the next CTF.