Project Page

• Project 1: Blackhat challenge. You will get 5 encrypted emails, each email will be encrypted with one of 5 historical ciphers. You can see the code which encrypts the texts but won't know a priori which email had which cipher. This is a hard starting project and I know it. Only some of you will beat all of the ciphers, all of you should beat at least 1. Part of the difficulty is that my paradigm for course work is different than what you are used to. You don't have a clear idea of what an A is and what an F is on something like this. Few professionals do. If you fail several but show excellence and grit in your approach and write-up that is likely an A. If you get them all right but don't seem to understand how then I'll think you cheated. Many of you come in with different levels of experience, so I try to measure your personal growth through the project. The most experienced students will have an exciting brain teaser, the least experienced students might have a quantum leap in growth (lives can massively improve through this project). On a technical level you'll get to practice deploying real life tricks which are analytical yet heuristic. It's a beautiful art which marries the power of CPUs and the structure of language. Good luck!
• A 7-problem Block Cipher CTF set, all made by me with flag format ninja{...} /project2