Tag: hexadecimal

capture the flag, hacking, web application security

InfoSec Institute CTF Challenge #14

thefluffy007

Another day, another challenge.

Today’s challenge comes from the InfoSec Institute CTF program.

Going to the following link we see the following:

infosec_14_intro

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

infosec_14_page_source

Hmm… there’s a file, titled level14 inside the misc folder. Let’s go that file and see what’s there…

Going to the file we see the following:

infosec_14_php_sql_dump

Hmm… it looks like we have a SQL dump that’s showing us all the tables and values inside of a php application.

Scrolling down we see something that looks interesting, and strange…

infosec_14_encoding

Could this be some type of encoding? Possibly hexadecimal encoding?

First, we don’t need the double forward slash, we just need one. Removing the extra slashes we get the following:

infosec_14_encoding_remove_slash

Using a Hex to ASCII converter here, we get:

infosec_14_solved

We found the flag – infosec_flagis_whatsorceryisthis

Lessons learned:

Our trick still works! We were able to find valuable information when looking at the page source. Going to the file listed we noticed it was a dump of SQL tables. Looking through the tables we noticed suspicious output, which we guessed was some type of encoding. Using information we learned from a previous challenge we were able to deduce that the encoding was hexadecimal encoding. From there we were able to find the flag.

capture the flag, hacking, web application security

InfoSec Institute Challenge #12

thefluffy007

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.