2017's challenge one-upped the previous by having a fully explorable, rogue-style text world in which one could explore to find challenges. Not to the level of ROM MUD or ZZT, two of my largest time sinks when I was young, but to a fun level where one could explore, see the sights, and have a humourous romp through a landscape influenced from David Bowie's film masterpiece, Labyrinth.
There are certain sections that are locked off by challenges; progression is only possible through successful completion of challenges. I was happy to get a pretty large chunk mapped out, though:
Each successful challenge also granted additional equipment to assist in combating the final boss. In a virtual sense; you can't fight him until you beat all other challenges anyhow. But, it was fun to track the equipment being given:
With that, on to the challenges. There were six categories of challenges again this year: Binary, Docs, Threat, Programming, and Mobile. There was also the Random category where challenges were sprinkled around the world and hidden behind riddles (highlighted in orange in the map above).
My goal for the year was to complete one entire track (Binary) and to get at least one challenge in each other category. Their system made some great changes over the previous year on tracking stats for challenges completed for each user, which provided good feedback on how you were completing tasks, pointing out when it was taking you too long (such as the spike below while I was on the road for 9 days).
Mobile 2 - MIPS
Hint: RouterLocker is free encryption software for securing your router. Thank you, in advance, for purchasing RouterLocker.
Author(s): int0x80
I had some upfront warning that this challenge was coming from int 0x80 and I made sure that I got to it during competition. MIPS is completely unknown to me, let alone how to analyze, debug, or even make it work. And I had less than two days open on my schedule to get it done. This was going to be an uphill climb.
routerlocker: ELF 32-bit MSB executable, MIPS, MIPS64 version 1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, with unknown capability 0x41000000 = 0xf676e75, with unknown capability 0x10000 = 0x70401, not stripped
This challenge began with static analysis using IDA Pro, and opening every manual I could find on MIPS programming to understand what I'd be looking at.
