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I made an 8 bit game that teaches beginners to pwn basic C programs
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- discussion=https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49712697, title=Show HN: I made an 8 bit game that teaches beginners to pwn basic C programs, I've been hosting small CTF for my alma mater high school every summer for the last few years, usually in the form of a sequence of website-based challenges that students could complete in an hour or two. This year, now that LLMs are startingly more capable (and people claiming CTFs are dead), I wanted to see if I could design challenges in a way that would minimize the ability to "drag and drop" them into a simple chat window and have it be solved for you, and at minimum require some intuition and interaction from the players. Seeing how bad frontier models were at the ARC AGI 3 benchmark (this pre-Astra), I thought it would be fun to translate aspects of pwning a program to spatial game-based mechanics and try to have some of the "reasoning" happen in the game world instead of all in code. This resulted in challenges where they have to interact with code to change parameters in the game to solve puzzles. While players do have to read code, the game expects no prior knowledge of C programming specifically, and tries to explain concepts such as structs, byte hex encoding, null-terminated strings, endianness, etc. from scratch. It has 10 rooms and builds up to the player being made to do a buffer overflow to clear the final room. There are items the player acquires to inspect source code, see program memory, and translate raw bytes to unsigned 4-byte ints or ASCII strings. There are still some gaps in the ramp up that could be better filled in and might require more hand-holding for complete beginners (I am thinking of adding an item that explains basic C semantics such as variables, conditionals, loops, I/O etc. when you directly hover over the code in the computer). Would love feedback from people here!
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