Challenge Categories and Distribution

The ECSC 2026 challenge categories will be:

• web - vulnerabilities in web (internet) applications,
• rev - reverse engineering
• hardware - vulnerabilities in hardware, protocols, and embedded software
• crypto - cryptography
• pwn - binary exploitation
• misc - other challenges not fitting into the above categories (there will be forensic challenges in this category).

We aim to have a broad range of difficulty levels, and to balance that difficulty between categories, so that there is something for everyone to solve.

The predefined difficulty indicators are subjective and may not accurately reflect the real difficulty of the challenge.