Introduction

What is Flare-On?

The Flare-On Challenge is the FLARE team's annual Capture-the-Flag (CTF) contest. It is a single-player series of Reverse Engineering puzzles that runs for 6 weeks every fall.

Notably, it is the reverse engineering CTF. The 11th edition, taking place in autumn of 2024, comprised of 10 challenges of increasing difficulty. The challenges were unlocked one at a time, each becoming available after the previous one had been solved.

If you're interested in trying to solve the challenges yourself, they should be available for download from flare-on.com.

A First Time Player

Although I've heard of Flare-On before and maybe even signed up out of curiosity, I never really tried putting in the effort and solving as many challenges as I could, until this year. Although I toyed with all kinds of tools, debuggers and even some crackmes as a teenager, my first proper introduction to reverse engineering binaries was in late 2023 when I took the Reverse Engineering course at FIT CTU. At that time, I was simultaneously working on my bachelor's thesis, so there wasn't much time to spend on pastimes such as a reversing CTF, but one year (and completed degree) later, I simply needed to try it out and see how far my skills would get me.

Eventually, I managed to solve 8 challenges before running out of energy. They all taught me a lot individually, but perhaps the biggest lesson of all was common to many of them — among the many ways this lesson could be phrased, perhaps "work smarter, not harder" or "don't overthink it" are some of the most fitting.

Unfortunately, being a full-time student with a part-time job, completing these writeups was only possible months after the CTF ended, and as such, I was not sure if they would have any value to anyone. All that is to say — welcome, and please enjoy the read.