The 2025 CSAW Experience
In case you missed the tags, this is NOT a technical writeup but rather a travel blog
This year, SPL qualified for NYU’s annual CSAW competition through various means. As per usual, SPL qualified 4 people (Dudcom, AC, Corgo, Vy) through CSAW CTF Quals, placing 2nd. We then had another team with me, Uvuvue, and Moron competing in the Agentic Automated CTF. More details about this will be in another blog on our very cool SquidAgent. We also qualified another team for the LLM CTF Attack Competition with Zia, but their event is online (though he still drove down with us).
Day 0 (11/5)
This was the day when everyone landed in NYC. All of our flights were paid for by NYU, with the exception of Zia driving down.
Dudcom, Zia, AC, and Vy were the first batch to land in the morning. These 4 decided to do something quite silly and spent $300+ at a Korean BBQ place called Ahgassi Gopchang. Can’t really blame them, it’s NYC, right.
Corgo and I landed around 6 to 8 PM, but nothing much happened that night; we were all waiting for everyone else to show up. Dudcom and I were just napping/doing homework while waiting for the rest of the team (Uvuvue and Moron) to come and prepare for competition tomorrow.
Moron arrived first. I was still in my room doing Physical Chemistry homework, and it turned out I missed quite a bit of stuff happening in the other room.
Jaden later came, and the team spent the rest of the night fixing up SquidAgent, hoping it wouldn’t break tomorrow (it broke tomorrow).
Day 0.5 (11/6)
Before CSAW officially started, the sleepless gang of me, Zia, Uvuvue, and Dudcom went for a quick walk around NYC.
We went to the Brooklyn Bridge and got some nice pics.
Dudcom being Dudcom, as per usual
Zia being Zia
This 60 Water was referenced in CSAW 2024 Quals
Day 1 (11/6)
Our agentic team started out first. We booted it up in front of the judge, ran it, and it broke. It took us a couple of hours of troubleshooting, reinstalling tooling, and other stuff just to see that the fix was to increase the Docker network capacity. But then it turned out NYU’s PortGuard API key was also a big part of the problem. The problem was that it just didn’t work. We decided to just run one category using our (Moron’s) money and called the benchmark there. We did get ourselves and the CTF team a decent room to lock in for the whole duration of CSAW, while the other CTF players were crammed into a corner.
The CTF team started at noon, with this signature quote from Dudcom:
Dudcom: There’s no rev, what is going on.
That’s one way to start a CTF.
I tried helping on random miscs and the 6 blind webs that were there, but I was focusing on fixing SquidAgent for the most time.
Oh, and also, we had a lot of boba. Throughout the whole trip, our team of 8 drank 29 bobas in total. Wow.
By the end of the day, we all hit this pose.
AC utilizing the 2-chair tech while Zia is just lying directly on the ground
Day 2 (11/7)
This day, the agentic team was already done with the benchmarking, and to not disrupt the hardworking CTF team, we went to Flushing for some good food.
I forgot to take pics of the chili oil beef noodles at the Flushing Golden Mall (my stomach ate before my phone sorry), but the food there was amazing. Instead, here’s a picture of the fish tank that they had.
I bought $40 worth of scratchers after this and won back $100!!! (best moment of the trip, for sure)
We then spent some of that money on some delicious Xiaolongbaos at Nan Xiang Xiaolongbao.
Meanwhile, the CTF team really locked in and won the CTF at midnight.
Day 2.5 (11/8)
After our CTF victory, the team decided to go to the CTF afterparty at Little More. We got to meet and talk to a lot of our fellow CTFers from GTech, .;,;., UCLA, etc. The CTF afterparty was a cozy and eventful end to CSAW with lots of food, music, and catching up with friends.
Day 3 (11/8)
This was our departing day, as well as the awards ceremony day. We all woke up early to attend the awards ceremony, only to see that none of our events were mentioned??? We were genuinely upset that our winning events were completely ignored, so we left early and grabbed brunch at La Pecora Bianca in Soho.
Somehow Dudcom decided to split off from us to get clothes, got lost with a dead phone, went to the wrong location, and then arrived a full hour late for our reservation. He really managed to make the timing as difficult as possible.
The 3-Person Trip
After brunch, most people had already left NYC except me, Vy, and AC. The rest of the day was just us 3 wandering around NYC with really no plans. We went to random stores and also had our first taste of Molly Tea, which tasted like the most premium jasmine tea ever.
We later decided to chill at Central Park for a bit, and that was also when CSAW Finals public rating voting started. The results speak for themselves. I was also tired and took a quick nap in the middle of the park.
We also had a fun little photoshoot with 3 guys who had no photography skills. I think it still turned out pretty well, though.
The Dinner Incident
Take a look at this image:
The 165 at the bottom doesn’t stand for a page number or anything. It was the price. Per person. That was a lot. And you’d think those food items on the menu would be huge if it were for that price, right? Here’s a sample portion:
This was Yingtao NYC, the first contemporary restaurant in the city to receive a Michelin star. The menu above was the tasting menu, meaning that its purpose is to serve samples of the restaurant’s signature dishes in miniature portions of 1 to 2 bites each. You could go here to see all of the meals.
They were absolutely incredible, and I loved every sample that came out. It was a phenomenal experience. Vy seems like he would agree.
What was troublesome was the price. Since this dinner kind of went under everyone else’s nose in SPL, we had to explain ourselves afterward.
We weren’t even full after all of that, so we decided to share a whole Banana Pudding Cup from Magnolia Bakery to fill up. It was extraordinarily well made.
This was when we had to go our own ways, and marked the end of our amazing CSAW Trip.
Again, thank you to NYU for hosting this amazing competition and for the facilities. We will definitely try to qualify for CSAW Finals 2026.
Also, thank you for reading the blog (or maybe you just quick-scrolled down here); it was definitely something fun to write on the weekends.
Bye Bye!
