[ProgSoc] CSAW CTF report

Peter Revelant revelant at progsoc.org
Mon Oct 1 16:04:20 EST 2012


On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Roland Turner <raz at raz.cx> wrote:
> 48 hours' use of an EC2 micro instance would have rendered the UTS firewall
> irrelevant and cost you US$0.96...

Thanks for the tip, Raz.
We did consider linode, and eventually found an alternate route, by
which time we were focusing our efforts on the reversing challenges,
as setting up the redirection would have cost us time, and we still
had to get the shell code to work as well.

I didn't realise Amazon EC2 was so cheap now. In future CTFs, we
should tee up one or two external proxies in advance for this purpose.
EC2 instances would also be useful for brute forcing challenges that
we aren't clever enough to solve the right way (TM), although this can
lead to being blocked, as described by ancat here:
https://isisblogs.poly.edu/2012/09/30/csaw-ctf-horseforce-writeup/

PR



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