r/netsec

I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on that I’m super excited about:

Project RedTeam: Contract Offensive

There’s a free Demo that provides a tutorial and lets you play a few contracts (no time limit, play as much as you want). Some players are already pulling some serious hours in the demo!

At its core, this is a game about using MITRE ATT&CK adversarial techniques against procedurally generated networks. It's delivered in a gameplay loop that plays a lot like Balatro and other card based Roguelike games. In Project RedTeam, you need to earn money to pay off debts after every contract within a run. Earn money by completing objectives, side bounties, or executing exfiltration/ransom against targets- the choice on how to be profitable is always yours.

It's a challenging but fun and fast paced take on network-intrusion cybersecurity concepts. It's entertaining in a deliberately gamified way.

A goal of this project was to create a hacking game that is realistic enough to keep it meaningful as a tool to teach intrusion concepts and stages to anyone- but not be overcomplicated and slow-paced like most hacking games.

I've put a lot of thought into the design and dynamics of how to capture the core-loop of network intrusion and turn it into a game that's approachable. The design direction of this project is an outcome of having over a decade of training and experience in cybersecurity.

Feel free to AMA! I'm happy to answer any questions about the game and/or development process :)

Give the game a Wishlist on Steam or share this post if it's something you support and want to see further development on.

Project background: This was implemented over the past 3 months using a modern development workflow (yes, modern AI tools make this possible- I'm not hiding that fact!). That being said, this is by far the most complex software project I've built as a solo developer and it was not an easy or simple development task. There's a Steam Community with a Dev Blog for this game that provides more history/progress updates on the project.

Mods: This will be my only and last post here, since it is promotional. I just wanted to share this since there’s been very positive interest from similar subreddits.

When analysing firmware attack surfaces, image decoders built into bootloaders get less scrutiny than cryptographically verified OS kernels. If image parsing happens before signature verification, any memory corruption in the parser breaks the secure boot trust model.

researchers analysed U-Boot's video subsystem (drivers/video/video_bmp.c) and identified an unbounded write in the RLE8 bitmap decoder (video_display_rle8_bitmap()) that leads to a pre-authentication Secure Boot bypass.

Root Cause and Vulnerability Mechanics

When U-Boot displays a boot logo or splash screen, it parses a BMP image loaded from local storage (SPI flash, MMC/eMMC, USB, or SD card).

Unbounded framebuffer write: During RLE8 decompression, video_display_rle8_bitmap() decodes run-length encoded streams directly into the active framebuffer without validating stream bounds against the frame boundary or allocated buffer size.

Pre-authentication execution window: In many embedded target configurations, the boot splash screen is rendered immediately on startup, before U-Boot calls Android Verified Boot (AVB) or FIT image signature verification routines.

Storage disparity: The kernel image and rootfs are signed, but splash images are frequently stored in unsigned, user-writable partitions or external media.

An attacker who writes a crafted RLE8 BMP to the boot storage can trigger an out-of-bounds write past the framebuffer during early boot, corrupting adjacent bootloader data structures, function pointers, or verification flags in memory.

This hijacks the execution flow before signature checking completes.