Editor's note:​

The Turtles WiFi challenges are a series of ctf-style problems concerning network and wifi security skills.

The tasks were a bit challenging, and invovled a combination of WiFi Cracking and exploring how WPA Authentication works, against a custom Access point using Salsa20 instead of AES.

Axel Souchet has kindly shared his writeup with us, which we share below.

Turtles: Virtual WiFi Hacking Challenges - March 2023

Introduction​

The older I get, the more fascinated I have become with the world surrounding me; I ask myself all the time 'how does this thing work uh 🤔?'. It is both fun and rewarding for me to understand the world a bit better. This is also a great way to be constantly humbled by the magic that surrounds us 🌈

Although I enjoy the process of learning how things work, there are millions of things that I interact with daily, that I know so little about; embarrassing.

Heck, how does WiFi work I thought? Because I know that I learn best by getting my hands dirty, I decided to try to solve a few challenges as an introduction. That is why I decided to check-out the March Turtle challenge 🙂

If you want to play at home, you can find the challenges on Github and one the SPR website:

• https://turtles.supernetworks.org/march
• https://github.com/spr-networks/turtles-march-2023

You can participate either directly from your browser via an impressive emulated Linux environment or you can self-host the challenge by cloning the turtles-march-2023 repository and follow the instructions. I chose to self-host the challenges as it made it easier to debug for me.

Editor's note:​

The Turtles WiFi challenges are a series of ctf-style problems concerning network and wifi security skills. We first ran a challenge in this style at Stockholm's Midnight Sun CTF Finals in August '22 at the Turtles MidnightSun Finals. You can play along with January's challenge, with the github repository.

January's winner, Amy from Ret2 Systems, has kindly let us share their challenge writeup. Congratulations! And thanks again for putting this writeup together.

February's contest will be released on the 20th and we will be giving out more raspberry pis!

Intro​

We find ourselves in a twisting maze of WLANs. There are 5 machines connected across several WLAN networks. We start as root on the first machine and must move laterally across the network to exfiltrate 3 flag files. From our box we can connect to an access point with the SSID "jan-turtle1".