Al-Kindi CTF
Named for the man who invented codebreaking.
A jeopardy-style competition for teams of two to four, open to students at Syrian universities. Every challenge teaches one technique, and the challenges are independent, so a team stuck on one is never blocked on the rest.
Why al-Kindi
Abu Yusuf Ya'qub al-Kindi wrote On Deciphering Cryptographic Messages in Baghdad around the year 850. In it he described frequency analysis: count how often each symbol appears in the ciphertext, compare that against ordinary language, and a substitution cipher falls apart. The technique broke ciphers for the next seven hundred years, and Europe did not arrive at it independently until the Renaissance. He did not write about codebreaking. He founded it.
Format
Categories
Ranks
Your rank comes from your score, so you can work the board in any order.