Jonathan Mettes

Cyber security challenge

This year I took part in CySCA 2014 - a 24-hour computer security competition for uni and TAFE students across Australia. The competition consisted of ‘capturing flags’ (completing challenges) in a simulated environment, involving tasks such as reverse-engineering programs, network forensics, cryptography and more.

Even though most of my team didn’t last the full 24-hours, we still managed to score 33rd place!

One particularly interesting task involved me having to recreate and uncompress a disk volume from captured network traffic (using Wireshark), mounting it and restoring deleted files (using Sleuthkit).

I didn’t end up solving that challenge, but I did come across a tongue-in-cheek easter egg image stating: “Nope. Not here”. Although slightly demotivating, I’ve got to appreciate the level of detail they went into creating these challenges haha. Can’t wait till next year!

VGA Drawing Device

For a group assignment at uni, we used a Spartan 3E FPGA board to create a drawing machine that lets you draw pixel art onto a VGA computer monitor.

We used verilog code modules to create the system circuitry on the FPGA for the drawing device.

Above is the block diagram for our finished system. Key components include a state machine for the different functions, ROM for saved pictures, a frame buffer storing pixel data, and timers to generate VGA signals.