Let us introduce ourselves

Hello! We are the Tower of Hanoi (also known as Hanoiati or LoHackers), the CTF team from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). We are a group of B.Sc, M.Sc, and Ph.D. students interested in information security. We love to play CTF and sometimes to organize them too (check out PoliCTF)!

We're also part of mHACKeroni, which joins the forces of many Italian CTF teams for DEF CON CTF Quals and Finals.

Our CTFTime profile lists the competitions we recently took part to.

Our designated meeting place is NECSTLab, a research laboratory in Politecnico di Milano does research in the field of computer architectures and security. Other than playing CTFs, sometimes we organize events known as Hackmeetings, where we solve challenges together, dissect both software and hardware, and learn new things.

⚑Cool, but... what is a CTF?

CTFs (Capture The Flag) are information security competitions, aimed at teaching how to find, exploit and patch security vulnerabilities and, in turn, how to avoid vulnerabilities when writing software.

🌐 Attack and Defence

Some CTFs are organized as attack-defense competitions: different teams receive a virtual machine image with some vulnerable (network) services; each team has to find the vulnerabilities, patch them in its own image to defend themselves from the attacks of other teams, and exploit the vulnerabilities attacking other teams to gain tokens (i.e., flags) needed to score game points.

🎯 Jeopardy

In jeopardy-style CTFs (the most popular choice), teams are presented with a set of specific challenges in a range of categories, touching aspects such as vulnerability exploitation, reverse engineering, cryptography and others.

📜 A bit of history

The team "Tower of Hanoi" traces its root back to 2004: the University of California, Santa Barbara organized in December 2004 a CTF (the iCTF) open to university students all over the world. Politecnico di Milano was invited and joined with the team "The Tower of Hanoi". Our team won the first and second (June 2005) edition of the contest; Tower of Hanoi has been playing iCTF every year since then.

In 2010, Tower of Hanoi grows up, becoming a full-fledged CTF team: we start competing also to other of the main online jeopardy and attack-defense CTFs, such as the DEF CON Qualifiers, PlaidCTF, CSAW, RuCTFe, and many others.

In the meantime, we also created our own CTF: in 2012, we go online with the first edition of the PoliCTF. The experiment was successful, and we repeated it in 2015 and 2017.

In 2018, we joined other academic and non-academic Italian teams to get serious into qualifying to the DEF CON CTF (i.e., the most important CTF!). We create the "mega-team" mHACKeroni, obtaining the second place to the DEF CON 2018 Qualifiers and the seventh place to the finals in Vegas.

☎️ Contact us

If you are interested, feel free to drop us a line! Our email address is [email protected], or you can find us on Twitter @towerofhanoi.