PicoCTF 2017 – looooong

Another day, another challenge…

Today’s blog post is to solve the looooong challenge from PicoCTF.

After login and opening the challenge we see the following:

We need to see how fast our typing speed.

Clicking on the hints we see the following:

Going to the command line and connecting to the server we get the following:

We see that we have thirty seconds to enter the following 533 r’s an a single 3.

The hint stated we should try using python.

I can’t say enough about Python. It’s a GREAT first language for beginners to learn. TheNewBoston on YouTube has a good tutorial on Python.

Anyway, back to the challenge – going to Google and typing “Python interpreter online” we’re presented with the following here.

Python has a great way of printing characters multiple times with the following:

print ‘a’ * 399

This will print a 399 times.

I have to admit I had to do this challenge a couple of times as I was slow.

I’m going to add the screenshots of the challenge I was able to solve.

Going to the link I provided I typed – print ‘v’ * 538 – I was presented with:

Copying the v’s and going back to our challenge, if we right click in the command line and select paste from browser we get the following:

Entering the v’s and adding the single 1 at the end and pressing OK I received the following:

We received the flag and acquired 20 points!

Word of advice – have AT LEAST two window open. 1 window with the challenge, the second window of the python interpreter.