Jorian Woltjer

Background

About Jorian Woltjer

In my younger years, I was always a curious kid, wanting to know how everything worked. From watching science videos, and taking mechanical things apart, to eventually finding programming via Scratch. This was fascinating to me, making the computer do what you want. I did this for a while until eventually discovering this crazy world of "code" via YouTube tutorials from The Coding Train. While I had watched a lot with no clue what's going on, at one point I got started with the basics for real with Processing, a Java-based programming language for making small visual programs. To me this was a whole new world opening up, generating complex patterns and interactive little games by just writing some lines of text. CTF (Capture The Flag) was the next period of my life, putting almost all my free time into playing challenges, reading writeups and starting to write some of my own. I think this is the single best way to learn deep technical hacking skills. Because I often played alone, I had to learn all common categories in order to compete. I liked basically all of it, from crypto to web to binary exploitation. Eventually, I noticed, however, that I was best at web security. It's also what I started my journey with initially. I started to shift my whole focus to web security. Another thing I found was that I really enjoyed creating writeups, explaining my thought process and the techniques taking note of the techniques I used to solve a challenge. Not only did it help others, but also myself to remember how I did something in the future. Eventually, just creating writeups wasn't enough and I got started on my biggest project yet: My Gitbook. This includes essentially all the knowledge I gained from CTFs and my own experiments, and to this day I'm using and expanding it almost daily. The biggest milestone for me was finding a genuinely novel technique involving an XS-Leak vulnerability in something I was very familiar with: CTFd. Many great hackers have likely looked at this but in my ignorence I decided to follow a rabbit hole anyway, which led to this very interesting discovery. Since then my focus has been on finding small new tricks that expand the boundaries of what's theoretically possible, and sharing that on my blog. All the while using my knowledge to hack and report vulnerabilities to real applications!