Member-only story
Writeup to the Decompetition capture the flag

Contents at a glance
- Introduction
- Preparation
- dem challenges
- Conclusion
- Shout outs
Introduction
The Decompetition capture the flag (2020 ed.) calls on reverse engineers from across the planet to reverse engineer native binaries written in C, C++, Go, Rust and Swift. The goal is for the contestant to reconstruct the compiled binary into its original source code as best as they can, and the CTF lasted for twenty-four (24) hours.

I signed up as the user EntropyThot and started my own “team” called the Rocking Philosophers — which basically just consisted of myself 😋
I scored 52nd place (out of 277 entrants). Assuming that my maths are correct, that puts me in the 77th percentile!
Preparation
I decided to do a little research about a week before Decompetition starts and practice so that I will hopefully get a higher rank. The CTF scores based on three criteria of the submission: how well your code passes unit tests (20% of…