Overview
Last week, I traveled to Lausanne, Switzerland to play in LakeCTF'23 Finals with thehackerscrew. I had a lot of fun meeting my teammates and making new friends, and had a great time in Switzerland. It was a really long journey going there from Malaysia, but the experience was definetely worth it.
Like my previous post, this isn’t going to be technical post, but instead a short blog about some of my experiences there. (I promise the next post is gonna be technical)
Thank you so much to RE:HACK for sponsoring my flights to Switzerland!
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne
One of the main reasons I wanted to come to this ctf is because it took place in EPFL, which is currently one of the top engineering schools in the world. I actually plan to study and do engineering in the future, so I wanted to visit EPFL and see what an elite engineering school looks like.
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The organisers of the ctfs, polyglots planned a short tour around the EPFL campus (which was huge), which involved touring around the SPOT, and the EPFL Data Centre.
The SPOT
The SPOT (Student Prototyping and Outreach Tank) is EPFL’s Makerspace, and it is actually one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen.
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It’s filled with really high tech machines used for making electronics, hardware, pcbs, printing, and pretty much anything you need to make anything you want. A lot of students were working on their projects there, ranging from bikes to rockets to rovers and it was super cool seeing them work. The environment just makes you feel inspired and innovative and kinda motivates you to work on your own projects there.
EPFL Data Centre
This is actually the first data centre I’ve ever visited, so that was cool. But it’s really just a data centre, so the insides are just filled with servers, and well, even more servers. (I mean, what did you expect?)
But the cool thing about this data centre is how environmental friendly it was, since it was covered with solar panels, and they actually redirect the heat produced by the servers to heat up the water that is pumped from the lake!
Pizza Party
There was a pizza party after the tour, and they prepared club-mates!
I remember hearing about club-mates in a LiveOverflow video before, and he said that it was associated with like german hacker culture or smthg, so it was really cool seeing one in real life!
We also got our lenyards and free shirts.
The CTF
We managed to get 4th! Nice job by the team and it was overall quite fun. I solved 1 pwn and helped out around with the other pwns.
The challenges were quite nice, and there was this one really cool hardware pwn challenge solved by my teammate @Aali, which involved doing RISC-V ROP on an actual piece of hardware, and making the flag display on the screen.
There was also tons of food prepared.
The Balelec Festival
The Balelec Music Festival, which is the largest student ran musical event in Europe happened right after the ctf ended, and the ctf organisers were nice enough to get us all free tickets to the event.
It’s the first festival I’ve ever attended, and I had a really great time with my teammates! I didn’t understand anything that was being performed since it was all in French, but the music sounded nice and the food was great. Only thing was that I’m not used to the weather so I thought it was quite cold out there, which was a completely different experience than Malaysia.
EOF
After the CTF ended, I toured around Switzerland a bit and got to visit a few cool places (I visited CERN!), and I have to say, Switzerland is really beautiful, the views were just crazy good.
Thanks so much to the EPFL School of Computing and polygl0ts for organising this wonderful event, I had a really nice time. And thanks so much to my teammates for making this ctf so fun!
Photo dump
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