A hack quest CTF by nullcon, good variety of difficulty and categories. Keeping track of the map interface was painful though.

Are Yaar  link

Points: 120

In a village there were 4 best friends one of them was Ramlal whose favorite dish was ‘pulihora’. He was a farmer and with lot of hardwork and passion he became CEO of a Software Organization. https://twitter.com/kulkarniramlal

The Twitter account linked to a GitHub profile, containing a single repo. There’s an interesting Notice - Investment Fraud-pdf.pdf inside, but it has parts redacted.

censored PDF

Opening in InkScape let us remove the censor bars, revealing the QR code.

QR

It’s just a base64 string, decoding gave the flag.

Bad Api  link

Points: 200

I got dumped here. Help me find my key out. Look everywhere, including the hidden rooms. I am waiting for you with a flag in my hand. https://chal.xyz

Note: An unknown service is running on following services.xyz:10344

The site sounds like a password form, so we looked at the service first.

nmap services.xyz -v -T4 -A -Pn -p 1234

PORT      STATE SERVICE VERSION
10344/tcp open  redis   Redis key-value store

It’s a Redis server, so we tried connecting with redis-cli.

redis-cli -h services.xyz -p 1234
services.xyz:1234> keys *
1) "ALLYOURBASE"
servicesxyz:1234> get ALLYOURBASE
"AREBELONGTOUS"

The password form was HTML with a hidden element, so replaying its POST with username=AREBELONGTOUS&secret_key=ALLYOURBASE got the flag.

NATO  link

Points: 200

A for Apple, B for Ball,can you decipher it faster than all? https://chal.xyz

The challenge site (a password form) linked to a Clue.zip, containing an m4a recording of some NATO alphabet words. They translated to LZJYOVZBY. The link text was 619240122, so caesar-shifting each letter by its corresponding number gives RASASVADA. This password got the flag.

Ninja Injection  link

Points: 200

Injections are to be administered carefully. Although, giving one in a lift is never advised. Until unless, you are a Ninja! https://chal.xyz/

The challenge site seemed blank, but there was a comment in the source.

<!-- Don't forget you are a l33t because of your name only.-->

name as a querystring parameter returned some form of templated string. So we tried some template injections, and {{1*1}} executed successfully. This seemed like a Jinja template based on the challenge name, so with some research we found an attack to achieve RCE. flag.txt was in the working directory.

Hazzy  link

Points: 250

I can see in this pandemic everything is flag{Hazzy_?} https://chal.xyz/chal.gif

The challenge was this gif:

Caprio laughing

The overlaid numbers were an A1Z26 cipher, giving the flag when combined with the hint.

MD20  link

Points: 300

Nuclear committee is suspicious about their codes getting leaked but 1o1 1o1 they forgot the master password to reset. https://chal.xyz

The challenge site linked to a password checker, and had a hint.

Hello there ,Does hashing a nuclear code 10 times make it strong ? (I’ve heard so).But the code is VERY Small in length..I mean really V E R Y short in length.

There’s also a broken <img src="output.PN">, fixing it to output.png gave another hint about the hashed password being a single character.

We moved on to the password checker, which dumped its source.

There was a hash reversal, and a WAF bypass. From the hints, the hash is a single character MD5ed 10 times, so time to bruteforce. pwntools will take too long, time to break out CyberChef.

CyberChef recipe

Searching manually, t is the matching character. The checker only hashes once, so we need 9th hash e6dbdd9d770af334d8aebe102b1fc035.

The checker needs _ as a querystring parameter, but it’s blocked by the WAF with strpos. And % is blocked too, so no URL-encoding. With some research, we found this blogpost - apparently PHP treats . in the querystring as _. ?.=e6dbdd9d770af334d8aebe102b1fc035 gave the flag.