Kevin Liu's Blog || Technical || Travel

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 This is the first post of the GaianSpace CTF 2026 chapter “05-rad-hard-rampage.” The whole series is beautifully designed: four challenges, each mapping exactly to one of the four real failure mechanisms that space radiation causes in electronics: Single Event Upset (SEU), Single Event Latch-up (SEL), Total Ionizing Dose (TID), and Displacement Damage (DDD). I’m writing one post per challenge. The other three posts: Single Event Latch-up / Lunar Latch-up、A Logic Gate Short...

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 This is the follow-up to Strange Holos 1, with the same setting and structure. Recognizing the script as Klingon wasn’t actually hard. What tripped me up was the last step: Klingon’s romanization and the letter it stands for as an English substitution cipher are two different things. What the challenge is aboutAgain just one image, space2-glitter.png (1536×1024, 2.4 MB), with no other leads: Same setup as the first one: a cyberpunk alley, a wall covered in strange neon graff...

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 This challenge gives you a single image and no hints at all. The whole solve needs no complicated code, just looking at the picture carefully. What the challenge is aboutYou get exactly one file: space1-glitter.png (1536×1024, 2.3 MB). Opening it looks like this: The image shows a cyberpunk-style alley at night, with a wall covered in neon graffiti written in some unreadable script, plus a few projected billboards in the background. The style fits this CTF’s GLITTERCITY them...

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 This challenge is a sequel to the previous one, One to Rule Them All, in the same Prismantir drone-swarm world. But the gameplay is completely different: the last one was protocol security, while this one is a pure signal-localization problem. And honestly, I submitted two wrong answers and had to take the long way around before remembering how to compute a circumcenter from middle-school geometry. What the challenge is about Prismantir was assigned to protect a VIP during Dyn...

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 In the same Prismantir drone-swarm world, this is the challenge with the shortest story but the most memorable payoff. 150 million bytes of raw telemetry, and at the very end you open an image to find a drone writing letters in the sky with its own flight path. What the challenge is about While known for their big eye in the sky, Prismantir huge drone fleet is also a behemoth to keep in control. Every night, each drone patrols its assigned block, following its route with clock...

🌐 中文版：繁體中文 This is the challenge with the most complete storyline in STARPWN 2026, I think. Technically it’s not especially brutal. It just stitches a hard-looking puzzle together with a few basic but easily-overlooked protocol features, and the final solution is almost comically simple. That said, I stepped in every pothole along the way. What the challenge is aboutThe backstory reads: Prismantir’s team got hands on an enemy drone last night - the rest of its swarm went dark before anyo...