Recently, the Black Hat MEA CTF Final 2025 concluded successfully in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. After three days of intense competition, a joint team composed of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, and Fudan University, competing under the name *0xA, claimed the global championship with a commanding total score of 8,225, securing an overwhelming lead over all other teams.
01 Competition Overview
Black Hat MEA (Middle East & Africa) is an internationally renowned conference in the field of cybersecurity and a key event within the global Black Hat series, held annually in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. As the conference’s flagship competitive event, the Black Hat MEA CTF is designed to assess participants’ comprehensive technical capabilities through real-world, hands-on challenges.
The 2025 competition took place at the Riyadh International Convention & Exhibition Center and attracted over 1,000 teams worldwide. Following multiple rounds of online qualifiers, top-performing teams advanced to the onsite finals. The challenges covered a full spectrum of cybersecurity domains, including web security, reverse engineering, binary exploitation, cryptography, and digital forensics, making it a truly international contest testing both technical excellence and teamwork.
02 Team Introduction
Team *0xA is a joint team formed by three elite university CTF teams: 0ops from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, AAA from Zhejiang University, and ****** from Fudan University.
Founded in 2013 at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 0ops is a student team integrating resources from the University’s leading cybersecurity laboratories. Its members are primarily undergraduate and graduate students from the School of Computer Science, supported by the University’s Network & Information Center, Student Innovation Center, and research groups such as the Network and System Security Laboratory.
Since its establishment, 0ops has achieved outstanding results in major domestic and international competitions, including Qiangwang Cup and DEF CON CTF. The team also founded 0CTF, a globally recognized CTF competition that attracts hundreds of teams from around the world each year and enjoys wide recognition across the international cybersecurity community.
03 Competition Highlights
Day1
As the competition began, team members specializing in cryptography took the lead, solving all crypto challenges within just one hour. Meanwhile, members focused on Web, Reverse Engineering, and Pwn secured the first solves for challenges such as Cat Pics Drive (logic vulnerability exploitation), AI 4 Rev? Nah, AI Rev!! (neural network model analysis), and Scream (kernel vulnerability exploitation). These early breakthroughs established a strong lead, allowing the team to top the leaderboard at the end of Day 1.
Day2
The competition intensified on the second day, with strong teams such as Odin from South Korea and the renowned international team r3kapig mounting continuous challenges for first place. In addition to securing the first solve of the miscellaneous challenge Between the Line (forensics), the team also achieved first blood on two cryptography challenges involving differential attacks and special-case RSA attacks. However, with three challenges left just one step short of completion, the team temporarily fell to second place, strengthening their resolve to make a decisive push on the final day.
Day3
On the final day, the team went all out, solving all challenges except those with zero prior solves before the competition entered “lights-out mode”, during which live scores were hidden for the final two hours. Under intense pressure, the team engaged in in-depth discussion and successfully solved Ninja V2 (XSS vulnerability exploitation), a challenge that had remained unsolved for a long time. This decisive breakthrough sealed the victory, securing the global championship with a nearly 1,000-point lead.
This championship victory is a testament to the power of elite collaboration and coordinated teamwork. As a core contributor, SJTU’s 0ops team delivered outstanding performances on critical challenges, vividly reflecting Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s achievements in cultivating top-tier innovative talent. Looking ahead, SJTU will continue to build on its strengths in cybersecurity, promoting learning through competition and advancing competition-driven education, to nurture world-class cybersecurity professionals and contribute to the development of a strong cyber nation.
Source: School of Computer Science
Editor: Chen Yuyang
Editor-in-Chief: Jin Xue
Translated by: Denise
Proofread by: Rebecca
