About#

Hello! I’m Dre.

also known as:

dre (real life)
kako57 (github)
drec (ctfs)
dre.cc (discord)
「」

I’m currently a fourth year student at the University of Toronto, with a major in Mental Health Studies and a minor in Biology and Computer Science.

CTFs#

Outside of school, I enjoy playing CTFs (Capture The Flag). I play for UofTCTF and L3ak. I mainly focus on reverse engineering and binary exploitation challenges, but I also enjoy playing around sandbox escapes, system exploitation, and other miscellaneous challenges. I authored a few writeups for CTF challenges I’ve solved, which can be found in this site.

As part of UofTCTF, I have exploited a set of vulnerabilities we discovered in PCRS, which is a system used to serve programming exercises to students at the University of Toronto. We found multiple ways to escape from the sandboxing of the code execution environment, and were able to achieve remote code execution on the host machine. The vulnerablities we found were later assigned as CVE-2023-46404.

Over the last three years, I have also authored a few CTF challenges, for both UofTCTF and L3AK CTF:

I have also been playing with [:], which is a big team that focuses on playing big and hard CTFs such as PlaidCTF and DEF CON CTF. I mainly contribute by making tools and scripts to help with reverse engineering.

Hacking at work#

I interned at Trend Micro in the winter and summer of 2024, and the winter of 2025. A notable achievement I had while working there was finding a zero-day vulnerability in NVIDIA Container Toolkit, later assigned CVE-2025-23359, also known as ZDI-25-087 / ZDI-CAN-26525

Aside from my discovery of a zero-day, I have authored functional proof of concepts and reports for other vulnerabilities:

Notable CTF Achievements#

I played too many CTFs, so here are some of my more notable CTF placements:

ScriptCTF 2025 - 1st
DeadSec CTF 2025 - 1st
UMassCTF 2025 - 1st
PlaidCTF 2025 - 2nd
LIT CTF 2025 - 3rd
Hack the Box: Data Dystopia @ DEF CON 32 - 1st
UMassCTF 2024 - 1st
SunshineCTF 2024 - 1st
COMPFEST CTF 2024 - 1st
DeadSec CTF 2024 - 1st
Akasec CTF 2024 - 1st
LIT CTF 2024 - 1st
ISSessions Espionage CTF 2024 - 1st
PicoCTF 2023 (Post-Secondary Leaderboard) - 2nd
CyberSci 2023 Regionals - 2nd
CyberSci 2022 Regionals - 3rd