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August's Summer Leaves
Well, it’s official: the autumn semester has begun and instruction has started again. I’ve been fortunate enough to (almost) have an extra week of summer vacation since all but one of my classes cancelled this week. The first week is totally remote to give students more last-minute time to move...
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Deciphering an Unknown File and Navigating MS-DOS to Retrieve a Flag
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. This is a writeup for a great forensics challenge that I did at UIUCTF 2021 where I found yet another reason to despise Microsoft – something I openly welcome! This challenge involves an unknown file format, navigating MS-DOS,...
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Diffing Images and Using Columnar LSB to Retrieve a Message
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. This is a writeup for another “forensics” challenge that I completed at UIUCTF 2021 where I took a rather unconventional and possibly even unintended approach to the challenge in order to arrive at a solution. I put “forensics”...
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Performing Digital Forensics on an Apple Tablet to Recover Evidence
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. Last weekend, I had the pleasure of competing at UIUCTF 2021 hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This was my team’s second time competing at UIUCTF and we scored 3rd out of 658 teams this year....
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UC Merced's Student Housing Crisis
Hey there. My name is Shawn Duong, and this is my blog. I’m a rising third-year Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate student at the University of California, Merced, and I’m on track to becoming homeless by the end of August. This isn’t clickbait, and I’m not special. There are others...
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Arch Linux UEFI+Encrypted+i3 Minimal Installation
So I finally got around to installing Arch Linux on my Node 202 SFF PC build. There’s still no GPU yet since prices are still pretty high as of writing this, but I figured I might as well install Arch on it while I wait for GPU prices to drop....
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Executing a Textbook ret2libc Attack to Pop a Shell
This writeup is also readable on my GitHub repository and team website. It’s been a while since I’ve written a CTF writeup! I’ve been very busy with school and work for the past year or so, and so my writeup authoring skills may be a bit rusty. From 9 July...
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Excited to Compete at redpwnCTF 2021
My team, IrisSec, will be competing at redpwnCTF 2021. I don’t usually announce these kinds of things on my blog, but I’m particularly excited about this event since I’ve done redpwnCTF in the past before and have high expectations for them. We’re going to be participating in the college division...