GreyMecha/Army
2025-06-26
In 2025, our GreyCTF finalists received the GreyMecha/Army badge, an RP2350 + LFE5U-25F FPGA badge complete with various animations, LED modes, Music, a (very popular) brick game, and much more. With this badge, we could explore what hardware security is like, on an embedded level, as well as even deeper, at a digital logic level and a computer architecture level.
It was extremely satisfying seeing the participants solve the various challenges (inspired by real world exploits) creatively, from connecting pins with jumpers, reverse engineering mpy files, analysing LED patterns, to reading high speed messages, exploiting hardware race conditions and even leaking + extracting the secret keys. Participants who completed the challenges would obtain full control of the CatCore system and be able to fully control the LEDs.
I (Concept/System Design, PCB, Firmware) couldn’t have made the badge so good without the rest of our badge team Le Yew Tan (PCB, Procurement, Leaky Pin) Shuqing Ge (Art + Animations), Wong Yu Zhang (Brick Game) for making this happen! Thanks to those who contributed/ helped us along the way Yuewei Wu, Hao Yu, Lucas Lim, Manzel Joseph Seet, Jie Feng Ho, and whoever else at NUS Greyhats!
Links
- Slides
- Execution Deep Dive
- LinkedIn Posts
- GitHub
Check it out!