Recently, I’ve been participating in some of the BSides Joint Task Force CTF challenges. This CTF is being put on by the organizers of the recent BSides Chicago and upcoming BSides Detroit. They’re spanning both conferences, and also releasing challenges online in between.

I thought I’d do a write up of one of these challenges, since it’s both a fun exercise and the way I solved it makes a good introduction to Ruby. If you’re never used Ruby, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s a powerful language, and I find it’s syntax to be extremely intuitive. Of course, there’s a number of ways to solve this challenge.

I’ll try to outline not only my path to solving this, but also some failed ideas, in the hopes that they’ll shed some light on my thought process.

Thanks to the BSJTF and especially to @dth0m for putting this challenge together.

I decided to try to try and get back on the blogging bandwagon. This will be where that happens.

I found my previous attempts encumbered by heavier blogging platforms that required a little more effort to work with. This left me putting off various posts until eventually they just didn’t happen at all. For this attempt, I’m trying Octopress. So far, I’m happy with it.

Octopress has a number of features that I like over other platforms I’ve tried in the past:

• Static content generation (Less attack surface)
• Markdown formatting for posts
• Rake integration for creating posts, pages, etc..
• Github Pages support
• Git workflow for pushing updates, etc.

In short, it’s lighter weight and fits better with tools I already use frequently. This should make it less burdensome and thus lead to more posts from me. Or at least, that’s the plan.