02Labs Blog
CTF writeups, OSINT notes, crypto solves, and systems deep dives
Long-form breakdowns from 02loveslollipop covering security challenges, investigations, and engineering work.
AlpacaHack Daily: No Content Writeup
I almost never write web writeups, mostly because I do not really enjoy web challenges. Still, this one was simple and funny enough that I thought it would be a good excuse to write a bit ab...
Daily AlpacaHack: The horn Writeup
This time we are presented with a "familiar" setting, just as in Carry the Flame we are given an "SPN"-style block cipher, but this time with some twists. First of all we are working with a...
RITSEC CTF: Zipped Writeup
For this challenge, we are given a ZIP file, zipped.zip, that contains two encrypted files: a PNG image (BeautifulDetailedSunset.png) that occupies most of the archive's size (2.3 MB), and a...
TAMUctf 2026: Phantom2 Writeup
In Phantom2 (the second part of a 2-part challenge during TAMUctf 2026), we are given once again a link to an almost "empty" GitHub repository with a single commit and a single README.md fil...
Daily AlpacaHack: Bloom Writeup
Daily AlpacaHack - Bloom presents us with a One-Time Pad encryption scheme where every byte of the plaintext is XORed with a cryptographically secure random byte (generated from os.urandom u...
DiceCTF 2026: Carry the Flame
This challenge presents us with a 1024-round SPN (Rijndael S-box, fixed 40-bit permutation) with a 40-bit key. The key is sampled separately for each connection, so the final guess must be s...
Batman's kitchen CTF 2026: Eye on the Sky & Eye on the Sky 2 Writeup
In this OSINT challenge for Batman’s kitchen CTF, we were given a single photo (sky.jpg) containing a mountain and a small aircraft silhouette above it. And 2 tasks were given with this: