My CTF Ventures: picoCTF, Reverse Engineering

This blog-style write-up recounts a participant’s progress through picoCTF’s Reverse Engineering room, covering challenges such as the Vault Door series, asm problems, Android “droids” APK tasks, and time-based binaries, while leveraging tools like Ghidra, radare2, objdump, JADX, apktool, and Android Studio. The author outlines approaches involving source code analysis, bitwise operations, encodings (ASCII, hex, octal, Base64, URL), XOR decryption, and binary reversing, highlighting successes, difficulties with assembly, and key takeaways about learning processes, scripting, and tool familiarity.