ctf-speedrun

name	ctf-speedrun
description	Drive a time-boxed CTF solve by prioritizing high-signal actions, cutting dead ends quickly, and switching to automation as soon as a lead appears.
license	MIT
compatibility	opencode

CTF Speedrun

What I do

• Optimize for time-to-first-breakthrough.
• Force early triage, aggressive prioritization, and fast abandonment of low-signal ideas.
• Push the workflow toward automation instead of repetitive manual poking.

When to use me

Use this whenever the user cares more about solving within the contest clock than about perfect elegance.

Time-boxing rules

1. Spend the first 2-3 minutes only on parallel triage and category detection.
2. Pick the top 2-3 attack paths and run them as parallel lanes; ignore the rest initially.
3. If a lane produces no new signal after 2-3 minutes, kill it immediately (no exceptions).
4. The moment interaction becomes repetitive (2+ identical steps), write a script immediately.
5. If a partial primitive appears, exploit that path before exploring something prettier.
6. Total challenge budget: 15-20 minutes for easy/medium, 30-40 for hard; enforce strictly.

Parallel lanes

Speedrun mode aggressively parallelizes discovery to minimize time-to-flag:

Lane limits

• Maximum 4 lanes total (including triage tools).
• Typical split: 2-3 hypothesis lanes + 1 tool lane.
• Never run more than 3 hypothesis lanes simultaneously.

Spawn rules

• Spawn lanes when attack surface is genuinely unclear (category ambiguous, multiple entry points).
• Spawn lanes when different bug classes have similar likelihood (e.g., SQLi vs path traversal vs IDOR).
• Spawn tool lanes immediately: file, strings, binwalk, exiftool, checksec in parallel.

Time budgets (strict)

• Triage tool lane: 30-60 seconds total.
• Individual hypothesis lane: 2-3 minutes max.
• No extensions; kill at budget expiration regardless of "almost there" status.

Merge triggers (merge immediately when any occur)

• Flag fragment or candidate recovered.
• Vulnerability confirmed with reproducible PoC.
• Exploit primitive identified (leak, write, read, control flow).
• Category definitively identified with evidence.

Kill triggers (abandon lane immediately)

• Time budget expires with no actionable signal.
• 3+ consecutive probes return identical negative results.
• Lane requires preconditions proven impossible by another lane.
• Another lane has merged and is progressing toward flag.

Automation triggers (switch to script immediately)

• Same request/operation repeated 2+ times.
• Brute force or enumeration space identified.
• Encoding/decoding pattern confirmed.
• Network interaction becomes non-trivial (3+ steps).

Operating rules

• Prefer evidence-rich actions: triage, source review, strings, metadata, protocol capture, fast enumeration.
• Prefer shortest exploit path over most general exploit path.
• Do not over-document during the active solve; keep notes minimal but factual.
• If stuck, reclassify the challenge instead of blindly digging deeper.
• Serial work is forbidden: If two investigations are independent, they must run in parallel.
• Evidence threshold: A lane lives or dies based on signal, not potential; no "just one more try".
• Script everything: Manual repetition is a speedrun failure; automate at first repetition.
• Merge ruthlessly: When one lane succeeds, kill others immediately and focus all resources on the winning path.

Escalation guide

• Web challenge stuck: shift from browser interaction to source or request replay.
• Pwn challenge stuck: shift from full exploit ambition to primitive proof and leak gathering.
• Rev challenge stuck: rewrite the smallest critical logic block into Python.
• Crypto challenge stuck: verify whether it is actually just encoding or a custom transform.
• Forensics challenge stuck: go back to containers, metadata, and extraction order.