Recently

A new set of challenges on Windows binary exploitation has been published!

The first challenge is public and the remaining 3 are temporarily exclusive to premium members. These will in turn become public at the following dates:

– PE32 - Local stack buffer overflow basic: public
– PE32 - Advanced stack buffer overflow: january 3
– PE32+ Egg Hunter: february 3
– PE32+ Basic ROP: march 3

An API allowing you to interact with Root-Me’s data is now available at api.www.root-me.org. The following enpoints are available:

• /login
• /challenges
• /challenges/id_challenge
• /auteurs
• /auteurs/id_auteur
• /environnements_virtuels
• /environnements_virtuels/id_environnement_virtuel

This is still a work in progress, please be mindful.

A new set of challenges on the subject of Ethereum smart contracts has been published!

The first challenge is public and the remaining 3 are exclusive to premium members. These will in turn become public at the following dates:

• Ethereum - Tutoreum: public
• Ethereum - Takeover: december 22
• Ethereum - NotSoPriv8: january 22
• Ethereum - BadStack : february 22

What has changed?

• portal index has been updated and summarizes the differences between available account types :)
• profile, score and statistics pages have evolved
• your settings page now let you fill in an address and business information. It will help us distribute goodies for foundation members and also offer more formal interships/positions through offers brought by Root-Me Pro
• skill badges are assigned when validating a challenge, creating a particular content or when contributing
• a text field makes it possible to filter the list of challenges
• the overall style evolves:
  • portal icons are now in SVG format
  • lightweight update of CSS styles
  • the new responsive design is now compatible with smaller screens

The backend also got its fair share of updates:

• a Microsoft Windows challenge machine (!): challenge05.root-me.org
• 20 new rooms in the CTF all day
• dozens new virtual environment are available in the CTF All the day

Happy hacking 😉

Here we go again ^^

To meet the numerous expectations of IT security professionnals, the Root-Me association has decided to innovate once again and launched the Root-Me Pro company to commercialize services.

Stay tuned ! 😉

Faced with the recurring demands from education and industry professionals, our community model had to evolve. The creation of the premium access meets these needs by providing innovative content that will benefit the entire community.

This paying access will provide more funding for challenges that are getting more and more complex and time consuming to create. The compensation model for the challenges is thus altered to tend towards a monetary compensation reflecting the amount of time spent by the members of the foundation when creating challenges.

These challenges will be accessible for a limited period (1 to 6 months) to Premium members only. When this exclusity period ends, the challenges will be made available for everyone.

Why did we do that? Here are some of the main benefits:

• better rewards for contributors: as a foundation member you have the opportunity to submit new challenges and get paid for it.
• create challenges incorporating recent attack techniques and requiring environments that are often expensive (in material resources, development, management, etc.).
• offer more content and new features each month, thanks to the support of Root-Me Pro staff.

The Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) is the largest student-run cyber security event in the United States. Organized by New York University (NYU), this event aims to bolster students’ awareness of cyber security (students from high schools through doctoral programs). CSAW is featuring competitions, workshops, and an industry fair allowing corporate and government organizations to promote and network with students.

The 15th contest will be held simultaneously on several continents : New-York City (NYU) for North America, in Valence (Grenoble-INP Esisar in France) for Europe and also in Israel, India and Tunisia.

The event turn around differents challenges like an entry-level CTF, an Embedded Security Challenge and others …

Inscriptions and info on https://csaw.engineering.nyu.edu/ctf

AlgoSecure is a French independent consulting firm specializing in IT security. Their job is to accompany their customers in France (Lyon, Paris, Grenoble and Saint-Étienne) to secure their information system.
Their expertise can be found in missions such as: intrusion test (pentest), PoC of infosec solutions, incident analysis, risk analysis, etc.
All AlgoSecure members share commonalities: intellectual integrity, passion for cybersecurity, and humanitarian values.

This sponsoring is mainly aimed at helping the foundation to design the cost of the resources needed to run this portal and to encourage its development.

The Cyber Security Awareness Week is the largest student-run cyber security event in the United States. Organized by New York University (NYU), this event aims to bolster students’ awareness of cyber security (students from high schools through doctoral programs). CSAW is featuring competitions, workshops, and an industry fair allowing corporate and government organizations to promote and network with students.

The 14th contest will be held simultaneously on several continents : New-York City (NYU) for North America, Abu Dhabi (NYU Abu Dhabi ) for Middle East and North Africa, Kanpur (IITK) for India and Valence (France) for Europe.

The CTF qualification round will be on September 15th. Registration is now opened. Concerning the « Embedded Security Challenge » and the « Applied Research Challenge » the submissions have started since the 1st of July.

With almost 100 000 registered members, 266 challenges and 54 virtual environments, we started to feel a little cramped. Then we pulled out the big artillery and migrated the infrastructure to a much more efficient server!

We are proud to welcome our new beast: 2x Intel® Xeon® E5 2620, 6-core 12 threads, 128 GB DDR3 ECC, 3 x 3TB SATA3.

With this, we can continue to provide you the best possible experience with:

• adding RAM and CPU to the machines that needed it;
• the creation of 7 new rooms for the CTF-ATD;
• adding environments to attack in CTF-ATD;
• the possibility of hosting more challenges requiring resources / servers (like ARM challenges, challenges with multiple machines, Windows challenges, etc.).

And as good news never comes alone, we have also updated the list of rewarded creations, so do not hesitate to feed up the platform!

Of course, all this is made possible by our sponsors, but also to your donations and subscriptions to the foundation!

So thanks ! And the root goes on ;)