Hello! After not completing the 2024 NSA Codebreaker Challenge, I decided to actually finish the 2025 one, since I also didn’t do FLARE-ON last year. This year, the challenge had 7 tasks, which I will be going over. Each task will be in its own subpost on the side, and this will just be a post with my overall thoughts and reflections on the challenge.
Personally I felt that this year had fairly good tasks, with the exception of task 2, which will be discussed more in its own post. It was a good mix of all the usual topics, with maybe a bit less focus on exploitation and more on forensics, but overall a good variety. I also felt like the difficulty was well balanced and ramped up well (at least after task 2). This is a little biased since I mainly do reverse engineering so the middle few tasks were easier for me.
Here is my overall rating for the tasks (out of 10):
| Task | Difficulty | Enjoyment |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 6 |
| 2 | 10 | 1 |
| 3 | 6 | 5 |
| 4 | 3 | 6 |
| 5 | 3 | 8 |
| 6 | 5 | 9 |
| 7 | 7 | 7 |
Anyway, I’m looking forward to 2026, which will be the last year I’ll be an eligible scorer, so definitely want to do well! See you all next year :)