Overview #

The Buckeye CTF is a CTF that ran from Sat, 30 September, 10:00 AEST to Mon, 02 October, 11:00 AEDT by Ohio State University (OSU). It was a similar format to PeCan+ and Lockheed Martin CyberQuest in that it was a ‘jeopardy’ style CTF, where there were multiple categories and each question was worth a certain amount of points.

The description from the event on CTFTime is as follows:

CTF run by students and alumni from Cyber Security Club @ Ohio State.
BuckeyeCTF is intended to be beginner-friendly and is geared towards university teams, but there will be a wide range of difficulty.
Format is jeopardy: web, reversing, binary exploitation, crypto, etc. with a focus on enjoyable problems.
Three divisions:
Open (no team size limit)
U.S. Undergraduate & high school (no team size limit)
Ohio State (1-4 students)
CTF site: https://ctf.osucyber.club

What happened #

I did the CTF with the same team that I did the work experience with, and I found out that they are all really damn smart! I was able to contribute to the team, but I was definitely the weakest one there, as I hadn’t developed the right thinking process for the challenges. I realise that the challenges are all about thinking outside the box and being able to look at any vulnerabilities of the problem provided, but I hadn’t developed the right thought processes to be able to get some of the challenges.

Overall, we managed to get a lot of points, but we weren’t able to come first (which isn’t bad for a first time team in highschool competing in a university CTF). We managed to come 15th overall, which we were very proud of, racking up 4,217 points total (where on average questions were about 150-350 points each), which is quite good in my opinion.

What I’ve Learned #

I’ve learned that there is a lot that I still don’t know about cyber security and I haven’t gotten the right way of going about problems and thinking about how to solve them in different ways. I have identified that there is still a lot that I can learn and through going and learning and practicing more through different mediums such as hackthebox, tryhackme and pentesterlabs, I should be able to continue to develop my skills to become much better at cyber security and CTF challenges.

Writeups #

Writeups for the challenges by other people: