Major wargame update (awe, the 25/05/2017 at 19h34)Comments (0)

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The old wargame (where "basic" and "classic" categories are hosted) was recently modernized a bit. For the record that wargame was launched in January 2011, initially on Debian 5 x86 with both ASLR and NX disabled.
Over the years it was moved to a Debian 8 x64 VM, but the challs remained x86 without ASLR/NX.
Since we're now in 2017 and these protections are present everywhere (except on FreeBSD for ASLR *cough*), I've decided to now enable ASLR and NX on (almost) all challs. The VM also moved from Debian 8 to Ubuntu 16.04, which is the usual choice in CTFs.
Many challenges are also now remote instead of local, and the source was adapted whenever necessary. However - even if we're in 2017, heh - the architecture is still x86 and without PIE (so only partial ASLR).
Indeed I wanted to keep a x86 wargame branch without *all* mitigations (just the default ones). Don't worry, you will have plenty enough of x64 soon™, and PIE is much more common there

This doesn't really impact the "basic" category, but it significantly changed the difficulty of several tasks in the "classic" category.
As a result all previous "classic" solves were invalidated, so if you solved it you'll have to solve the new version to get your points back.
To be fair with those that solved the older version, they keep their access to the old afterwards (now moved to /dev/null) - which might help.. or not.
Of course all these challenges were tested and solved, you don't have to worry about that.

I've tried to make it progressive so that those not familiar with ASLR/NX can discover with smaller steps than going directly to ROP.
I know that this will annoy quite a few people, but hopefully you'll enjoy the "hardened classic" version enough to forgive me

Since all classic challenges are now more or less hardened, having a "hardened" category doesn't make sense anymore, therefore it was renamed "linux x64", and "classic" becomes "linux x86".

We recently had a new crypto - singularity - from ThunderLord, which is still waiting for its first solve!
2 new wargames are also available now: ropbaby and netchecker, both from myself.

Haters gonna hate, roppers gonna rop!

New Web challenges (awe, the 12/05/2016 at 19h36)Comments (0)

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It's been a while since last news, although challenges were published in the mean time..
Today we have 3 new challenges in the Hacking category:

• Beat them all, by agix
• Take a view by agix
• privescalator by awe

If you have preferences for the categories of future challenges, let us know! Also note that contributions are still very welcome

Edit: + a new crypto, RandomRSA by ThunderLord!

Moar cookies (awe, the 30/06/2015 at 19h22)Comments (0)

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After the death "cryptor" from ThunderLord, noob cryptos from awe
2 new crypto challs: CookieCrypt II & CookieCrypt III!

By the way, the site is now full HTTPS/HSTS (not including subdomains), which may have unpredicted consequences (ex: the IRC bot is still connecting in HTTP atm). If you find related bugs, please report them!

hf & bon appetit!

Security Day (awe, the 12/12/2014 at 10h16)Comments (1)

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Quick news to announce a security event that will be held in Lille (France) on January 16th, where you'll meet several W3Challs members (some are speakers!).

More info on http://securitydaylille1.github.io/ and #securityday on irc.w3challs.com!
Topics are cool so gogogo

Steganomoar (awe, the 21/10/2014 at 00h33)Comments (0)

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The whole steganography category has been moved to /dev/null, to go along with the opinion of the majority (myself in particular, I won't deny it :P), who hasn't found it interesting on W3Challs for quite a while (it doesn't mean the challs were bad though). This also includes the Shape Shifting cracking challenge, which was also tagged #stegano.

I understand that this may be annoying for some of you, however if you like these challenges, they are indeed still present, just not on the front line!
If the authors wish to move their challenges to other websites, no problem on my end.

Moreover, for a completely different reasons, the JSexec wargame challenge also moved to /dev/null, because of the following reasons:
- it has been down for around 2 years now
- the spidermonkey version doesn't exist on Debian anymore (and isn't maintained)
- the API is completely changed
- newer gcc versions have different behaviors, which makes the vuln as it is unexploitable
- different stack/heap layouts
- the wargame architecture has changed, and x86 over amd64 doesn't exactly work as native x86...
- the fact that I was the one responsible to fix it although I didn't solve it -__-
- etc, etc... and perhaps because awe is a fapper < real reason?

It's not impossible that this one would rise from the dead, although I'd prefer to invest this time into creating a new one that would be more up-to-date... hardened esoteric maybe?

Haters gonna hate, fapperz gonna fap. Life goes on.

\o