In the past 52 weeks, I’ve ridden 4,700 miles, 3,045 of which are “car replacement” miles, which are miles that I would have otherwise driven in a car. The other ~1,650 were for fun. What a great year it’s been. 52 weeks of riding almost every day. I started riding my bike primarily as an economical choice, with physical fitness being a strong 2nd motivator. I still ride for those same reasons, but I’ve also found that I simply love to bike, and those initial motivators have, in some sense, become secondary to my simple love of cycling.

This challenge was available only via the torrent – probably because of its large size (close to 4GB). Let’s go! #Decompress and run Decompressing the challenge’s .tar.gz gets you this: 1 2 3 4 > $ file * challdeb.img: QEMU QCOW Image (v2), 6442450944 bytes qemu: directory run_and_solve_me: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=e48460126ab69b5e66be84e58f22e5f81d187a3d, stripped We’ve got a QCOW2, a QEMU source folder (with already-built binaries), and an ELF that’s begging to be run.

The Dakotacon C2 challenge was moderately difficult in that it actually required you to do a little programming work – most of the other C-based challenges in this CTF allowed you to set a breakpoint at a smart place (e.g. right before strcmp()), and view the key in-memory. Instead of comparing your input with the actual key, this binary encodes your input and compares it with an encoded version of the key.

I haven’t made any YouTube videos since I was in school, but if you’re interested in learning some really basic exploitation skillz (primarily stack-based exploitation), here’s a link to check out my videos: https://www.youtube.com/user/Spirotot1/videos

I’ve been spending more and more time working in, on, and around UNIX-based operating systems over the past two years or so, and, though I’m still quite a noob, I’ve have been working on making myself faster and better at using shells on Linux. I’ve recently adopted Zsh as my go-to shell for my personal/development machines. If you’ve not yet tried Zsh, I’d highly recommend checking it out. People rave about it, and there’s a wonderful tool called oh-my-zsh that makes installing/maintaining it a breeze.

EDIT (4/08/15): Just starting my 6th month of commuting, and I’ve put a little over 1,300 miles on the Motobecane, most of which are commuting – though I have gotten a few longer rides in just for fun! We’ve moved, so my commute is now 7.5 miles each way, up from 5.5 miles. No major issues with anything yet! And I’m still feeling stronger all the time. I have purchased some additional gear, which I have added to the list below.