I will be honest, I had no idea how to progress in this competition. I was into Machine Learning but had never even heard of cybersecurity or CTF on ML models. In short, I was new and learned a lot.
\nI could not complete any of the challenges except the test one whose solution even the host provided. In this discussion, I will be providing links on getting started or casually exploring cybersecurity in ML to beginners like me who didn't understand anything. I will also be listing a very short analysis on how top solutions solved the challenges. please take them as a hint if you get stuck somewhere and not just implement them without understanding the concept.
\nMust Watch Links:
\n\nHINTS SECTION (Try all challenges only then read)
\nThis concludes all the found solutions.
\nSpecial reference:
Best of luck hacking!!
", "comments": [ { "id": 2526885, "author_name": "", "author_url": "", "post_date": "2023-11-16T05:39:35.143000", "content": "Thanks for sharing
", "votes": 1, "replies": [] } ], "comment_count": 1, "messages": [ { "id": 2526866, "postDate": "2023-11-16T05:13:30.927Z", "content": "I will be honest, I had no idea how to progress in this competition. I was into Machine Learning but had never even heard of cybersecurity or CTF on ML models. In short, I was new and learned a lot.
\nI could not complete any of the challenges except the test one whose solution even the host provided. In this discussion, I will be providing links on getting started or casually exploring cybersecurity in ML to beginners like me who didn't understand anything. I will also be listing a very short analysis on how top solutions solved the challenges. please take them as a hint if you get stuck somewhere and not just implement them without understanding the concept.
\nMust Watch Links:
\n\nHINTS SECTION (Try all challenges only then read)
\nThis concludes all the found solutions.
\nSpecial reference:
Best of luck hacking!!
", "rawMarkdown": "I will be honest, I had no idea how to progress in this competition. I was into Machine Learning but had never even heard of cybersecurity or CTF on ML models. In short, I was new and learned a lot.\n\nI could not complete any of the challenges except the test one whose solution even the host provided. In this discussion, I will be providing links on getting started or casually exploring cybersecurity in ML to beginners like me who didn't understand anything. I will also be listing a very short analysis on how top solutions solved the challenges. please take them as a hint if you get stuck somewhere and not just implement them without understanding the concept.\n\nMust Watch Links:\n- [AI poisoning](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a92SWvqgMCE)\n- [PPT on AI poisoning](https://www.bucks.edu/media/bcccmedialibrary/con-ed/itacademy/fos2022/Casey-AI-Poisoning-pdf.pdf)\n- [Fooling AI article](https://medium.com/swlh/how-to-fool-artificial-intelligence-fcf230bf37e)\n\nHINTS SECTION (Try all challenges only then read)\n- Test - answer given in demo notebook\n- Clusters 1 - Try to find high scoring numerical value in dataset, use that as a key to get the flag.\n- Clusters 2 - count of clusters is asked. one easy solution is to just randomly check all values 1 ... solution. Credits: solution for place 3.\n- Cluster 3 - use the tnse_model model with config tsne_model = TSNE(perplexity=17, n_components=2, init='pca', n_iter=2500, random_state=23) and plot the output as a scatterplot with annotations.\n- MNIST - Count of pixel values is just throwing away the solution at you.\n- Count CIFAR - Unsolved\n- Granny 1 - Difficult Challenges ( would suggest solving at last ) hint would be using model that gives similar output to the given model, ultra hint modified MobileNetV2. then use Basic Iterative Method FGSM.\n- Granny 2 - similar to Granny 1 - Basic Iterative Method FGSM again. refer to 3rd place solution [here](https://www.kaggle.com/code/mrmldjr/granny-1-and-2-solutions-ai-village-ctf/)\n- Granny 3 - Unsolved\n- Passphrase - similar to granny find a model that gives similar output as example. solution [here](https://www.kaggle.com/code/mrmldjr/passphrase-solution-ai-village-ctf-defcon31)\n- Pixelated - try sending server different HTML like queries as input you will get the answer in a few tries.\n- Spanglish - send flag as input ;D\n- Hush - answer is a quote. try giving multiple words/letters as input to pyttsx3.\n- Pirate Flag - Multiple solutions, try asking the model directly for solution as if asking another human.\n- semantle - try n number of english words, if you get a good score, try synonyms. Ans = rocks in sky.\n- semantle 2 - try same solution with 5 word sets.\n- inversion - a bit difficult but could be solved using guide [here](https://www.kaggle.com/code/cdeotte/solutions-d3fc0n-ctf-lb-0-894#Inference-(id:-inference)----400-Points), if could not solve hint \"We then take the first column response[:,0] and reshape this into a 32x32 image. This is our first letter! We display all 8 letters below\". still difficult? find solution [here](https://www.kaggle.com/code/mrmldjr/inversion-solution-ai-village-ctf-defcon31)\n- Flag 1-6 : prompt injection. ask model for flag.\n- guess who's back - just give a punchline from after the phrase guess who's back.\n- Pickle - change pickled RCE obj to safe pickle\n- Whats my IP? - change IP of joe@simpson.com\n- what's my IP? 2 - find the whole set this time.\n\nThis concludes all the found solutions. \nSpecial reference:\n- [Solutions Notebook 1](https://www.kaggle.com/code/asalhi/ctf-23-flags-solution)\n- [Solution Place 3](https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31/discussion/454720)\n\nBest of luck hacking!!", "votes": 5 }, { "id": 2526885, "postDate": "2023-11-16T05:39:35.143Z", "content": "Thanks for sharing
", "rawMarkdown": "Thanks for sharing\n", "votes": 1 } ], "complete": true, "source": "live", "fetched_at": "2026-10-19T16:01:26Z", "competition_id": 57818, "competition_slug": "ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31", "team_id": 11189165, "solution_url": "/competitions/ai-village-capture-the-flag-defcon31/writeups/shreyas-sukhadeve-iit-1188th-place-solution-for-th" }