I spent the weekend putting together a small reverse engineering project, and honestly, it turned out way better than I expected. When I first got into reversing, I kept running into the same problem: everything online was either too advanced or too boring. So I decided to build something simple enough for beginners, but still fun to dig through with Ghidra.
The project is called Flag Hunt, and it is up on GitHub here:
The whole idea is to give people a small binary they can load into Ghidra and actually learn something in the first 10 minutes instead of feeling lost. It is a short C program with five tiny challenges, each one teaching a concept you will see over and over again in real reverse engineering work.
Challenge 1: The warmup
The first challenge is about as simple as it gets. The program asks for a 4 digit PIN, and the PIN is literally hardcoded in the binary. This teaches one of the first things every beginner learns: check the strings. Ghidra practically hands you the answer. It is silly and easy, but it warms you up for the next steps.
Challenge 2: Understanding XOR
After that, things get more interesting. The program checks a password, and if you get it right, it calls a decoding function. This is where beginners usually freeze up, but you do not need to be a genius. You just look at how the function works. It loops through each byte and XORs it with one key. Once you spot that pattern, you can write a five line Python script and decode the flag yourself. That feeling when the readable text appears is addictive.
Challenge 3: A tiny math puzzle
The third challenge checks three integers against a couple of equations. At first it looks confusing, but it is not a math test. It teaches you to slow down and read the conditions. You do not need calculus. You can brute force the values or solve them by hand. This builds confidence with condition logic, which is something you use constantly in reverse engineering.
Challenge 4: Custom hashing
Now it gets fun. Instead of comparing your input directly, the program hashes it with a custom function. When I first learned reversing, custom hash functions always scared me. But once you decompile it and see the logic, copying it into Python and brute forcing the right word is not as hard as it looks. This challenge teaches patience and pattern recognition.
Challenge 5: Final phrase
The last challenge is simple once you beat the others. It checks a final phrase, then decodes the last encoded flag. By now, you already know how to decode it because the earlier challenges prepared you for it.
I built this whole project to help people get comfortable with Ghidra without feeling overwhelmed. The decompiler does most of the heavy lifting. You just need curiosity and patience. If you want to try it, grab the project from GitHub, load the binary into Ghidra, and see how far you can get before peeking at the walkthrough.
It is honestly one of the best ways to learn reverse engineering from scratch.
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