capture the flag, hacking, web application security

InfoSec Institute Challenge #12

Another day, another challenge.

Today’s challenge is coming from the InfoSec Institute.

Going to the following link we see the following:

infosec_12_intro

Doing a right click, view page source we see the following:

infosec_12_css

We noticed there’s an extra CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).  Let’s see what’s in this file.

Going to the file we see the following:

infosec_12_css_opened

Hmm… this looks interesting. Knowing a thing or two about CSS, the colors are represented in hex (hexadecimal, base 16) form. More can be found here.

I’m thinking this is the actual flag, but it’s just encoded.

Using out knowledge from other challenges, let’s try base64 decoding, since it has worked before.

Going to the link here, and typing in the encoding we get the following:

infosec_12_base_64_decoding

Our decoding wasn’t successful. This encoding is not base64.

Going back to the challenge, we know that CSS uses hexadecimal to represent colors.

Maybe the encoding is in hexadecimal form.

Going to Google and typing in “converting hexadecimal to text” we get the following link.

Putting our encoding in the text box and changing the decoding to “hexadecimal to text” we get the following:

infosec_12_flag

We found the flag!

Lessons learned:

Attention to detail! We noticed that there was another file when we did the right click, view page source. Going to that page we noticed that there was encoding. We first tried base64 which did not work. Going back to the drawboard on how CSS works, we know the colors are represented in hexadecimal. Doing a Google search of hexadecimal to text we were able to find the flag.