The InfoSecurity Challenge (TISC) 2023

The InfoSecurity Challenge (TISC) is a two-week online sequential style Capture-the-Flag (CTF) competition organised by Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies (CSIT) since 2020. It provides opportunities for interested Singaporeans to put their cybersecurity and programming skills to the test by solving challenging puzzles against the clock. There will be a series of challenges for participants to complete, sequentially, in increasing level of difficulty. The levels will cover various topics including, but not limited to, Web Penetration, Forensics, Reverse Engineering, Binary Exploitation, Cryptography, Mobile, Cloud and OSINT.

TISC 2023 saw the participation of more than a thousand Singaporeans, and I proudly secured the 61^st position among the highly competitive field. The challenges presented significant difficulties for me, particularly because they predominantly covered domains in which I lacked confidence, notably reverse engineering. I encountered a particular challenge at the 5^th stage where I spent over a week delving into Discord's API Documentations and manually crafting individual requests with Discord BOT tokens, only to discover that there was a more straightforward method to simulate a bot's access to a server. Despite the challenges, this experience proved to be highly enriching and provided me with valuable insights into the realm of reverse engineering. I definitely plan to participate in the future iterations of TISC without a doubt!