I am not a Cybersecurity person. That would be my friend, who has recently been involving me in CTFs every other week. Usually, I'm able to finish these events with some minor contributions, solving one or two challenges while my friend tackles the tough ones. With that being said, my involvement in the recent RITSEC 2025 CTF went differently. Maybe it was the home field advantage, considering I went to college at RIT. This event, I finished the event having completed a number of challenges, and in some interesting ways. In this write up, I'll discuss how I sought out problems, got my team a respectable 883 points at RITSEC 2025 CTF.
Strike Team Biometrics (51 Solves)
Imagre :)
The premise behind this challenge was very simple. You start a CSV file full of rows representing people, a columns of numbers for a characteristic of that person. Then the final column indicated if someone was sick or not. The first few (of hundreds) looked like this:
- 6,148,72,35,0,33.6,0.627,50,1
- 1,85,66,29,0,26.6,0.351,31,0
- 8,183,64,0,0,23.3,0.672,32,1
Then, there was a second CSV file without that final column. To solve the problem, you'd need to find the pattern of characteristics that determines whether someone is sick or healthy. At first, this challenge seemed tedious. I suspected it would amount to rearranging data until I finally noticed the common pattern between each entry. But, before I did that, I was compelled to try an idea I thought would have no chance of working. Could I use the examples to train a neural network find the pattern for me?