2018 Flare-On Challenge Solutions

We are pleased to announce the conclusion of the fifth annual
Flare-On Challenge. The numbers are in and we can safely say that this
was by far the most difficult challenge we’ve ever hosted. We plan to
reduce the difficulty next year, so i… Continue reading 2018 Flare-On Challenge Solutions

Announcing the Fifth Annual Flare-On Challenge

The FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering (FLARE) team’s annual
reverse engineering challenge will start at 8:00 p.m. ET on Aug. 24,
2018. This is a CTF-style challenge for all active and aspiring
reverse engineers, malware analysts, an… Continue reading Announcing the Fifth Annual Flare-On Challenge

Recognizing and Avoiding Disassembled Junk

There is a common annoyance that seems to plague every reverse
engineer and incident responder at some point in their career: wasting
time or energy looking at junk code. Junk code is a sequence of bytes
that you have disassembled that are not ac… Continue reading Recognizing and Avoiding Disassembled Junk

2017 Flare-On Challenge Solutions

Another year, another successful Flare-On Challenge. I’d first like
to thank our challenge authors for their hard work developing each of
the challenges, and also for writing up their solutions:

  • Challenge #1: Dominik Weber (@Invalid_handle)
  • Challenge #2: Nhan Huynh
  • Challenge #3: Matt Williams
    (@0xmwilliams)
  • Challenge #4: James T. Bennett
    (@jtbennettjr)
  • Challenge #5: Tyler Dean (@spresec)
  • Challenge #6: Jon Erickson (@2130706433)
  • Challenge #7:
    Michael Bailey (@mykill)
  • Challenge #8: Moritz Raabe
    (@m_r_tz)
  • Challenge #9: Joshua Homan
  • Challenge #10:
    Dominik Weber (@Invalid_handle)
  • Challenge #11: Nick Harbour
    (@nickharbour)
  • Challenge #12: Jay Smith (@jay_smif)

Our popularity and participation continued to swell, with a 57
percent increase in total players (3240) and a 304 percent increase in
the number of players who solved at least one challenge (2566) over
last year. The overall difficulty also appears to have increased this
year, with only 2.7 percent of players (90 total) completing the
challenge, a decrease from the 6 percent who completed last
year’s challenge
.

The following graph shows the total number of players who solved
each stage of the challenge:

The 90 players who completed the challenge will have their names
forever listed on our hall of fame, and they will receive a prize. The
prize this year is this massive Flare pin that measures nearly 4
inches across:

This pin is a great item to sport on your backpack or affix to your
lanyard. The above is a mock-up from the manufacturer – we expect to
receive them in the next few weeks and will begin shipping them to the
winners soon after.

All the binaries from this year’s challenge are now posted on the Flare-On
website
 (password: flare), and here are the solutions written by
each challenge author:

  1. SOLUTION
    #1
  2. SOLUTION
    #2
  3. SOLUTION
    #3
  4. SOLUTION
    #4
  5. SOLUTION
    #5
  6. SOLUTION
    #6
  7. SOLUTION
    #7
  8. SOLUTION
    #8
  9. SOLUTION
    #9
  10. SOLUTION
    #10
  11. SOLUTION
    #11
  12. SOLUTION
    #12

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Continue reading 2017 Flare-On Challenge Solutions