
English: 
While I was in Las Vegas for the DEF CON CTF,
niklas from eat sleep pwn repeat asked me
about the Real World CTF Qualification but
I had no clue.
Apparently my team qualified for the finals,
and I didn’t even know.
You can see we are well organized.
This Real World CTF seemed a bit weird, it
kinda came out of nowhere, it promised 100.000
dollars for the first place in the finals,
but the price was also in USDT, a crypto currency
which is basically bound to the US dollar.
It was a Chinese CTF by this company Chaitin
Tech.
But the challenges were actually really cool,
and they were based on real world applications.
Most notable was probably the P90_RUSH_B challenge
where a CS:GO map parsing bug had to be exploited.
So for a while it was unclear if the finals
will still happen as we didn’t hear much
about it anymore.
But then suddenly we got the invitation to
come to Zhengzhou, china to participate in

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English: 
the Real World CTF Finals 2018 on the 1. and
2.
December.
We booked our flight, got our visas and had
no idea what to expect.
Our team met up in Frankfurt Germany to fly
together to Hong Kong and then continue to
Zhengzhou.
On the first flight one team-mate figured
out a crazy combination of steps to crash
the inflight system which is based on android.
It leads to crashing the QT5PacLauncher.
Screen goes black.
And eventually it restarts.
On iMacs at the HongKong airport where you
can surf the internet.
You are supposed to only use this tool here.
But again a team-mate found a way to escape
the program and gain access to the underlaying
operating system.
You can tell I was traveling with hackers.
Anyway… we arrived later in the day in Zhengzhou
and unfortunately the weather was not great.
Organizers actually warned us of the air quality.
While it looked kinda sad and grey during
the day.

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English: 
The fog or the pollution(?) looked actually
really awesome at night.
It really had a cyberpunk flair.
We were staying in this huuge skyscraper hotel
on floor 40-something next to a lake and a
convention center where the CTF was going
to be.
So once we got settled we decided to walked
around and see some stuff.
And we couldn’t believe our eyes.
There were these big posters about the Real
World CTF and pointing into the direction
where it would be.
Oh wow this seemed a bit more serious than
we thought it would be.
We walked a bit further and then we saw this.
At the convention building there was a HUUUGE
banner with Real World CTF and all the team
names.
And a crazy looking entrance.
What is going on??
What is this crazy event?
Because I only had a crappy phone, here are
some pics from the next day.
This is crazy….
There is our name!
This is NOT what we expected.
Who the f’ would be watching us?
This is just a CTF!

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English: 
We are not like esport fun to watch?
So the next day was the start of the CTF and
this was the first time we walked into the
CTF area.

WHAT THE F’ IS THIS!?

Well… yeah… so this looked crazy.
Each team had a cool table with our team names
and logos on it.
We felt not at all prepared for this level
of professionalism.
You would think we would prepare A LOT for
the huge prices,... but be real….
We have NO CHANCE against these other teams,
we were just here to have fun.
But if there is a next time I will still prepare
more.
This is insane.

English: 
Around the CTF areas a few sponsors had setup
some marketing booths, like Pangu Team, Qihoo
360 and many more.
But I never interacted with them.
So we had about 1h to setup before the CTF
starts and after we resolved all our networking
issues we were waiting for it to start.
Countdown.
19 minutes.
The CTF would go for two days.
1.
And 2.
Of december.
And
Also the rules of the CTF were introduced
to us.
It’s a jeopardy style ctf, so very typical,
but several challenges required demoing it
on stage.
For example there was a challenge called station
escape where you were given a minimally modified
vmware binary, they patched something in it
to introduce a vulnerability, and then you
had to exploit it and pop the calculator on
the stage.
For example here RPISEC exploited the host
and executed the calculator.
And got FIRST BLOOD.
There was some browser exploitation, some
web challenges, even doing some car hacking

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English: 
on stage.
Oh and each team got a camera as well as a
router and both of them were challenges.
You had to hack into the router and you also
had to find a way to access and control the
camera without authentication.
So there were really cool challenges.
If you want to know what I did during the
CTF, well I can tell you I didn’t solve
anything.
Infact I spent BOTH DAYS.
INCLUDING THE NIGHT TIME on the blockchain
challenge Acoraida Monica.
I have done quite a bit of smart contract
stuff this year and I thought: “F’ YEAH!
This is my challenge.
No problemo.
Ezy pointz”... gosh was I wrong.
This challenge was crazy hard.
And I did make progress.
Slow.
But progress.
And thus I never gave up.
Of course in retrospect I should have spent
my time on something else for points, but
I actually learned SOOO much more about ethereum
smart contract internals.
It was so useful to me.
I’m so blown away by this challenge and
I definitely want to make a video talking
about.

English: 
However our team did solve a challenge.
And that was the router.
They were actually rushing it.
Because demos on stage take time and the end
of the CTF was nearing each team had to register
for a spot for demoing it.
So we registered without having a working
exploit.
And literally 5 minutes before the end the
exploit worked, a super quick test run was
done to see if it works, and they rushed onto
the stage.
With 3 minutes left on the clock, team ALLES!
Was the last team to win a flag.
Our only flag.
But we were so damn proud.
Overall the CTF was super hard.
We were 5 people and I was sucked into a single
challenge, so kinda only 4 people.
Other teams, especially the ones that were
in the top had actually more people helping
offsite, over the internet, which is totally
fine and allowed.
Our team just doesn’t have that many dedicated
players.

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English: 
So I feel like this CTF would have been perfect
for a team of like 8-10 people.
I think that would have been sweet spot.
5 was too low, and 20 or so would too much.
On average 1 day per challenge would have
been nice.
Oh and just in case you wonder, solving a
single challenge was still pretty good.
The final scorebored looked like this.
Actually a team asked me to censor their cero
points because they felt so embarassed, so
I hide it here.
But they shouldn’t be embarassed.
It was a really hard CTF and everybody should
be proud to even have qualified.
While the stage and light effects and demos
was awesome, it was a bit of a bummer that
almost nobody celebrated it.
Very rarely people would clap or cheer for
successful popped calcs on stage.

English: 
LCBC was probably the happiest on stage for
pwning a challenge.
But with every demo we saw I was hoping that
the room would burst out into claps and cheers.
So this is a call to my fellow CTFers, comeon!
Let’s celebrate this awesome hacks more.
Let us show people that this awesome!
One other thing I’d like to mention was
how weird it was to have all those guards
there.
And at the entrance there were x-ray machines
for the bags and pat down.
I don’t know if these guards were police
or just security, but there were not just
a few at the entrance, they were standing
just meters apart, and they were standing
there for HOURS, I felt so bad for them.
That must have been sooo boring.
There was even a large group patrolling with
riot shields and sticks and stuff every few
hours or so.

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English: 
I think they were supposed to protect us and
make us feel safe and make sure nothing bad
happens, but to be honest, I felt more threatened
by it.
It was really weird.
One other interesting cultural observation
I had was smoking.
So apparently smoking was banned inside of
places or so just a few years ago, but people
just kinda ignore it.
Or well… they hide.
In the toilet.
So everytime you go to the bathroom there
are people and employees just hanging out
and smoking.
I’m somebody who really likes a clean, quiet,
empty bathroom, this was a bit irritating.
Other than that nothing weird happened.
Everybody was super nice to us and we were
put in a nice hotel, and breakfast was awesome,
they even apologized constantly when small
things went not quite right and the organizers
in general made us feel very welcome.
It was a really well organized and great event.
Kudos for that.
On the day after the CTF, when the winner
was clear there was a small conference with

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English: 
an award ceremony.
This is where we got a small glimpse into
day-to-day chinese politics.
They even had live translators for us.
I don’t remember who exactly spoke, but
there were several important people there
and I think it was like the mayor and some
misters or so, just talking about the importance
of security, and that the government has to
invest more into this, and support IT security
education and this Real World CTF was part
of this.
This was a competition in IT security on a
high level, in order to motivate young people
to go into this field and also position China
as being cutting-edge in IT security.
Or actually it was less about China as a whole
and more about the region itself, you know
China is huuuge and they were often just talking
about the Henan province which has even a
bigger population than Germany.
And the city Zhengzouh where we were, is almost
3 times bigger than german’s capital city
Berlin.

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English: 
So of course for local politicians it’s
more about positioning Zhengzouh as a hub
for IT companies.
This is where talent is, and where the REAL
WORLD CTF Finals happened.
They want their economy to prosper.
So of course this is all about marketing and
economics, but it was just really fascinating
to not just hear about global political news,
but to get a small glimpse into this day-to-day
boring local politics.
And the marketing was really crazy.
After the CTF they even got multiple pages
in a local newspaper ready for the next day.
And so thanks china.
Now I have to own a picture of Trump in order
to keep this piece of memory of the Real World
CTF.
I used google translate on my phone to read
some lines in the newspaper, but it was a
bit rough.
“The Most powerful brain idle sports network
offensive and defensive surgery”.
We also got some stickers which of course
have to go onto my laptop.

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English: 
And we got this metal challenge coin.
You can tell I had a lot of fun there and
I was so glad that I went.
I’m really looking forward to next year
and hope we can qualify again.
Thanks also to my team-mates, I really enjoyed
traveling and playing with you and congratulations
to LC:BC, 217 and ESPR for rocking this CTF.
And nice to meet so many new people and see
familiar faces again.
