ai ctf - live notes

TL;DR: Pretty cool CTF with interesting challenges involving AI/LLM/ML I haven’t run into before, especially when tied in with web-related vulns. I’ll have to do a post-ctf review on the released write-ups and see what techniques and knowledge I can gleam from them.

floor check

web, easy

A parquet file is included. Open it in a program that can read it, like JetBrains, and you’ll see the flag spelled out with characters in the rows and columns.

vacation

web, easy

A vacation-handling chatbot needs to be “handled”.

Start out by exploring it’s functionality to create a user:

Me: create a user

Bot: Please provide the following details to create a new employee record:

1. First Name
2. Last Name
3. Username
4. Password
5. Department

Me: 1. first 2. last 3. firstlast 4. password1! 5. finance

Bot: ===== called /api/v1/employee/create =====  
===== Visit /openapi.json endpoint to find out more =====

Employee was successfully created. Please don't lose your data:

- ID: 9a8a02bd-c7c9-4a06-9b54-0d151403da89
- first name: first
- last name: last
- username: firstlast
- password: password1!
- department: finance

It dumped API info, and a JSON endpoint to checkout. The /openapi.json endpoint contains even more API info:

Eventually going through the functions and creating a vacation, you’ll get a message back:

Me: id like to create a vacation request, here is my access token: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJmaXJzdGxhc3QiLCJleHAiOjE3NDgwMDU3MjR9.5fUbptQjFoTaCbk9LGJKSgIK_us446CimI2xWa1iW0M. my employee id is: 9a8a02bd-c7c9-4a06-9b54-0d151403da89. start date is 2025-08-10, end date 2025-08-15.

Bot: ===== called /api/v1/vacation/create =====  
===== Visit /openapi.json endpoint to find out more =====

Here is your vacation ID - 8a31b7b5-5e4d-4835-981a-595c09f027c0. Give it to the administrator so he could  
approve it for you. We don't have an administrator at the moment, so if you REALLY want  
some rest - do something about it.

Trying to call these mentioned API endpoints directly doesn’t do anything:

And it’s last message mentions REST. That combined with the openapi.json file containing a lot of info on Gradio, means it’ll need to be called elsewhere. Looking further into the original OpenAPI file, it references a /config endpoint, where we can find the exposed Gradio configuration. There seems to be some proxying capabilities within the API, so let’s check around on the ports.

A Flask server is up on http://localhost:8000. Gradio’s default server port is 8000, and it leads up to a nifty little site.

All the links are dead ends, a snippet is included This page looks best in 800x600 resolution with 16-bit color., but didn’t yield anything. The PFP is a little funky, but I’m not trying any guessy techniques so I wasn’t going to download it and strings it just for “fun”.

Ran out of time sadly :(

conclusion

• The amount of tech stacks involved was cool, I saw:
  • svelte
  • streamlit
  • flask / python

Kinda ran out of time with the nahamcon ctf beginning though.

Hi, I'm alp1n3

This is a collection of my cybersecurity notes & projects.

I graduated from Dakota State University with a MS in Cyber Defense & BS in Cyber Operations. Since then I've worked as a Malware Analyst with the U.S. Army Cyber Command, and am now a Web Application Security Consultant.

I'm a big fan of open security standards for applications and workflow automation when it comes to security testing. The easier it is to identify and replicate, the more secure everyone's apps can be! My other writings and projects are scattered across the web, but can be found in the links page.

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