BLACK HAT · INVESTIGATION
Pentower:
The Cyber Tower of Pentera
The world's greatest security vendors joined forces to build the tallest cyber defense tower ever raised. Each secured a single layer. Each declared victory.
Seven layers. Seven vendors. Network, Identity, Cloud, Applications, APIs, Data, AI — each team hardened their own floor and signed off on it. On paper, the tower is impregnable.
But nobody validated the entire tower. Every seam between the layers, every assumption stacked on the one below — untested. And days before Black Hat, an analyst found something: a hidden weakness buried somewhere inside.
Your mission: investigate the tower, recover the hidden validation code, and prove what everyone else only assumed. Start at the Layer Registry — the vendors logged more there than they meant to.
This isn't just for the leaderboard. Recover the hidden validation code, bring it to our booth, and walk away with:
No spoilers — just the tradecraft. Work the layers in order.
- Recon. The Layer Registry ships more than it renders. Read the client.
- SQL injection. One lookup trusts its input a little too much.
- Decoding. What you pull out is packed, not written.
- Reverse engineering. The final gate has to be understood, not guessed.