RHme3 Hacking through failure
summary
Four-month RHme3 CTF entry against ~500 teams yields 17 flags and a third-place finish after repeated dead-ends: built a side-channel rig around a PicoScope and battery-isolated target, rebuilt a transistor for glitching when ChipWhisperer FPGA locking failed, and wrote an AVR loader/IDA module to handle Xmega quirks. Spent weeks capturing ~250k traces, brute-forced emulated scan chains on planes, and hit fake AES rounds and individualized firmware bugs; many hacks work intermittently but produce usable flags and full write-ups on GitHub.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Introduction and team overview
- 3:55Leveraging outside resources
- 7:26Back to the future challenge
- 12:46Side channel analysis setup
- 15:37JLSCA and scripting struggles
- 16:19Car key fob brute force
- 19:03Hand lifting assembly code
- 21:50Failure stories and lessons
- 28:21JTAGulator missteps
- 30:50Failure as part of innovation
- 32:15Impostor side channel challenge
- 34:23Maintaining momentum in CTFs
- 34:43Summary and Q&A
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