Yes, you read that right: NSA as in National Security Agency.
This blog post is being written after the fact. The event started back in October of this year, but it is a long running CTF challenge that is actually still going. This was my second CTF to participate in. I was on cloud nine after my experience with the SANS Community CTF that I couldn't wait to find another event.
What exactly is the NSA Codebreaker Challenge? From their website:
The NSA Codebreaker Challenge provides students with a hands-on opportunity to develop their reverse-engineering / low-level code analysis skills while working on a realistic problem set centered around the NSA's mission.
Let me start this by saying I had no idea what was in store for me. This CTF challenge is on another level of difficulty. Phase 1 only consists of 6 Tasks. My knowledge and abilities only took me to Task 3! But the challenges were really fun and challenging. What I like the most about it is all the Tasks are based on a scenario that the NSA created:
How cool is that, right? Another thing that made this CTF different is that it is only open to anyone with a recognized U.S. school or university e-mail address. Even the leaderboards are based on the name of the school, college, or university and not the individual. Which brings me to my next topic. . .
This was my first collaborative CTF. I found out about this CTF from searching, and I was able to sign up for it as an individual because I already had my WGU e-mail address. By the time the event came around, I got accepted to join the WGU Cybersecurity Club. Since WGU is a distance learning university, all of us are located all over the U.S. We utilized a Discord server to communicate with each other. It was a good experience working with a group of individuals I have never met before, and to come together to accomplish a goal.
There was only a handful of us (at the time), and we all had varying degrees of CTF experience and security knowledge. I wasn't enrolled in any classes at WGU at this time (I was waiting on transcript verification), others have completed their first and second terms, and one was a cyber alumni! Most of the collaboration happened via online chat. But a cool feature of Discord servers is the option to add a voice chat. I think this experience can translate well in the real world with a lot of people working remotely and depending on technology to communicate with their co-workers in order to solve problems.
Here's a brief summary of the topics of security that were covered by each task:
Task 1: Computer Forensics, Command Line, Encryption Tools
Task 2: Computer Forensics, Metadata Analysis, Encryption Tools
Task 3: Computer Forensics, Metadata Analysis, Encryption Tools
Task 4: Graph Algorithms, Computer Science
There are two more Tasks that are in Phase 1, but I didn't get that far, so I won't include them in this post. Some of the tools I used in the tasks:
Command line: file
Command line: exiftool
Command line: gpg
CyberChef encoding/decoding
What I loved about this event was that although there were only 6 tasks (3 of which I didn't solve), each task required multiple steps to find the information you needed. It wasn't just performing one step and then getting the flag. So that part of it really felt realistic, especially the computer forensics parts (which were my favorite). We were provided with files off of the kidnapped journalist's Home folder, and we had to analyze them for clues and hints.
Like I stated above, this event is still current. As such, I don't want to spoil the solutions for anyone that may be reading this. Again, the point of my website is to show my knowledge, skills, and abilities. And so I'm providing the write-ups for the first 3 challenges in the link below for any potential employers wanting some insight on my thought process and work.
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