SANS Holiday Hack Challenge 2019

Introduction

This article was written to document my experience during the 2019 SANS Holiday Hack Challenge, hosted as part of KringleCon II at Elf University at the North Pole. I started working on the challenges 3 days before Christmas, and at the time I didn’t think I would manage to solve them all. As such, I didn’t really consider making the write-up in the first place. But after many man hours of work, I was getting closer and closer to the finish line, and I had so much fun during the whole event, that I decided I should make a write-up to document it … I hope you will find this Tutorial useful and perhaps even fun to read! :)

Background

The people behind this event are part of an organisation called SANS, an institute for research and education, established in 1989 with the main focus on cyber security. It is not a huge surprise therefore, that they host such an event. In fact they do it year after year, always timed for the holiday season. I cannot remember exactly how I first discovered it, but I have been trying my best every year since 2015. Below is an old photo I took of the NetWars room from the 2015 challenge.

I still remember how captivated I was by the game’s old-school graphics that reminded me of the old 2D Prince of Persia game. The KringleCon organisers also put some extra coziness into the game’s atmosphere, by using in some holiday-styled music each year. I cannot emphasise how well these small details works to keep me hooked on the challenge, even if I am stuck for hours and hours… :) If you are curious, you can find this year’s soundtrack here.

More to the point: this write-up is organised into sections according to the different objectives given in the personal badge in-game. On the left side you can find each Objective in order they are supposed to be solved. Feel free to skip ahead in your reading if you wish, however, the storyline makes the most sense if you read them in the suggested order.

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude towards SANS, and all the people who take part in making this challenge a reality year after year. It truly makes the holiday season a bit more special each time! :)