Crypto

This is a writeup for “Confessions”, the first web challenge I solved. I was luckily able to finish this challenge in a couple hours, so I could focus my attention to the other super interesting web problems. Confessions was a nice dive into some simple GraphQL manipulation and baby crypto. Let’s Begin! The confessions webpage was a message-generation application that would hash (in sha-256) your message based on the title and content of it. Under the hood we see the nature of how these messages are stored: ...

Last year, before I became an active participant in Maple Bacon, the team went on to participate in and land a top 10 position in Trend Micro 2019 Qualifiers, later going on to compete in the finals of that year. When the 2020 serving came up this weekend, I wanted to keep with tradition and maintain the pattern - and so we landed a top 10 position and will be going on ahead to the 2020 finals :) ...

Comic from XKCD. I am not an expert in either cryptography nor algorithm analysis. However, ever since a very rewarding advanced algorithm analysis class, one question has always dwelled in my mind: what would “P=NP” mean for cryptography? I had heard that such a statement, “P=NP” is controversial in the world of security. Learning about algorithm complexity has certainly shed quite a bit of light on the topic. As a cybersecurity researcher, I was compelled to satisfy my curiosity and answer that question for myself. ...