[mansam]

hey hyperplane, that's an excellent point. I'll see about clarifying the contest description.

To answer your question directly though, it's a bit of a mix of mostly introductory concepts with the goal of introducing crypto and breaking/defensive programming to people who might not get much exposure to it. The first challenges are simple crypto-based challenges to get participants into the right frame of mind, and they culminate with exploiting a hash length extension vulnerability. Hopefully, we'd like to introduce more challenges like this in the future.

[wavesounds]

Sounds like fun I signed up! Question though how long does the contest run for? How many challenges are there and how long should each one take?

[mansam]

Glad you signed up! :) The contest is going to run for 4 hours, and there are 4 challenges. The first two should take about an hour total, with the remaining 3 hours split over the remaining harder two challenges.

[rvivek]

The contest is for 4 hours and there will be 4 challenges. The challenges will be later archived and posted on the security track at hackerrank.com (to be created after the contest)