Mechanical Madness

We have intercepted an encrypted message with critical information, and also managed to recover the machine that is able to decrypt it, with a copy of the source program it should run to decrypt the message. The crazy scientist that built this machine was accidentally killed during the extraction. It’s a very elaborate mechanical machine with tons of pipes and valves but we managed to reverse-engineer its logic and build a simulation out of it, but now we need to convert the source of the program into something that the machine is able to understand and execute!...

December 2, 2021 · 6 min · rgw, nh1729

Out of Time

Quick we need to get access to the bunker and we are running out of time! The door is using an advanced steam-powered door locking mechanism which we cannot breach. One of our scientists managed to make a tool that measures the mechanical stress of the pipes moving steam during the verification of the password and created a power consumption model but it looks like just random signals. Can you find anything useful in the data?...

December 2, 2021 · 4 min · rgw

Remote

A remote facility is secured by a two-part access control system. The exterior device contains a keypad that is connected to a microcontroller, which sends entered passwords to a remote API for authorization. During an operation, we succeeded in tapping the connection between the keypad and embedded device. The only thing preventing us from gaining access to the facility now is to decode the obtained data and send the password to /api....

March 24, 2021 · 1 min · kh1

Block

We intercepted a serial communication between two microcontrollers. It seems that the first microcontroller is using a weird protocol to access a flash memory controlled by the second microcontroller. We were able to retrieve 16 sectors of the memory before the connection was disrupted. Can you retrieve what it was read? Category: Hardware Solver: davex Writeup For this challenge, the only thing you received was a zip file containing two files....

3 min · davex

Trace

During the attempt to exploit a secure crypto-processor we identified some embedded logic in it. We were able to recreate the logic diagram and make a block diagram to map its connections to the original circuit. We need to identify its use, which may lead to compromising the chip. Category: Hardware Solver: davex Writeup We first looked up the content of the challenge website is. When you entered the website you could saw a diagram of the system described in the description....

3 min · davex