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Forge CTF

Prepare for a round

Nobody freezes on a board because they lack talent — they freeze because they have no routine. Here is one, along with the tooling each category needs and somewhere to rehearse where nothing counts.

Rehearse on a solo box Practice a season round The Haunted Night Shift Read the rules

The routine

Spend the first five minutes reading, not solving

Open every challenge, note its category and points, and rank them by what you already know how to do. The cheapest points in a round are the ones you found before anyone else was looking.

Install your kit before the gun, not after

Each category needs its own tooling on the box. Tick the kits you expect to need on the launch screen — a round is a bad time to discover the reversing tools are not installed.

Keep one scratch file per challenge

Paste every command you run and every string you recover. Half of CTF solving is noticing that the thing you dumped twenty minutes ago is the key to a different challenge.

Finish the easy board first

Points decay as more players solve a challenge, so an easy flag is worth most early. Take the whole low tier before you sink an hour into the hard one.

Take the hint when you are truly stuck

A hint costs points; twenty minutes of staring costs more. If you have had no new information for ten minutes, buy the hint or move to another challenge and come back.

Enumerate before you exploit

Ports, paths, headers, files, version strings. Most challenges are solved by reading something the author left in plain sight, not by a clever payload.

Know the flag format and submit as you go

Submit the moment you have a flag rather than batching at the end — a buzzer does not care that the answer was in your notes.

Leave ten minutes at the end

Spend them submitting anything half-finished, re-reading prompts for exact wording, and checking you have not fat-fingered a flag you already solved.

Your kit

Tick these on the launch screen before a round. Everything is simulated on the box — no real tool runs and nothing leaves the browser.

Scripting kit

python3 / bash

Deterministic Python 3 with the competition libraries (requests, beautifulsoup4, pycryptodome, pillow, pwntools, z3-solver, angr) plus shell scripting.

misc

Recon kit

nmap / netcat

Port and service discovery against the simulated topology, plus raw sockets.

network
osint
recon

Web exploitation kit

gobuster / ffuf / nikto / sqlmap

Content discovery, scanner findings and injection testing against web targets.

web

Reverse engineering kit

binutils / gdb / radare2

Headers, sections, symbols, disassembly, decompiler view and call tracing.

malware
rev

Exploitation kit

pwntools

Interact with challenge services over nc, with cyclic patterns and offsets.

pwn

Cryptography kit

openssl / gpg / CyberChef

Digests, symmetric and RSA operations, encodings and classical ciphers.

crypto

Steganography & carving kit

binwalk / exiftool / steghide / zsteg

Metadata, embedded-file carving, LSB inspection and passphrase extraction.

stego

Password cracking kit

john / hashcat / hydra

Wordlist attacks on authored hash dumps, archives and login services.

identity

Forensics kit

sleuthkit / volatility / wireshark

Disk and memory triage plus packet analysis over authored evidence.

forensics

Drill the reference targets

Every scored round is cut from these. Work them easiest first, on a solo box, until the first move is automatic.

  1. Deployed with .git

    osint
    Easy
    needs the Recon kit

    Look for what was deployed by accident — repositories, backups, metadata, old commits.

  2. Keyring oracle

    crypto
    Fair
    needs the Cryptography kit

    Work out what the oracle gives you for free, then feed it something you already know.

  3. Storefront search (SQLi)

    web
    Fair
    needs the Web exploitation kit

    Map the site, then look at what the app trusts: the query string, the cookie, the token header.

  4. Legacy maintenance login

    identity
    Fair
    needs the Password cracking kit

    Enumerate the accounts, then attack the weakest credential rather than the strongest one.

  5. Canteen ordering service

    pwn
    Hard
    needs the Exploitation kit

    Find the input that is longer than the buffer, then work out how far it is to the saved return address.

  6. Partner portal (JWT)

    web
    Hard
    needs the Web exploitation kit

    Map the site, then look at what the app trusts: the query string, the cookie, the token header.

  7. Telemetry vault

    misc
    Brutal
    needs the Scripting kit

    Read the prompt twice. Misc challenges usually tell you exactly what they want.

Where to rehearse

Solo boxes

A fresh box rolled for you, any time. Nothing is recorded on the season board.

  • Sprint — 30 min. Three approachable targets and half an hour. A lunch-break contest.
  • Standard round — 60 min. Five targets across crypto, web, pwn and forensics in the classic hour.
  • Marathon — 90 min. Every reference target on one box, ninety minutes, no mercy.
Start a solo round

Season rounds, as practice

The real boards. Taken outside their window they are filed as practice and never touch your season score.

  • Round 1 — Opening recon — 45 min.
  • Round 2 — Web and crypto — 60 min.
  • Round 3 — Binary night — 60 min.
  • Round 4 — The finals — 90 min.
Open the season board

Every host, service and flag on the range is simulated in your browser. Nothing real executes and no traffic leaves the range.