PicoCTF Writeups – strings it
# Information:
CTF Name: PicoCTF
CTF Challenge: strings it
Challenge Category: General Skills
Challenge Points: 100
PicoCTF 2019.
# Challenge Description:
Can you find the flag in file without running it?
# Writeup
To solve this challenge I first clicked on the file word on the description. By clicking, a file was downloaded. The file was named strings.
In the description, they ask if I can find the flag without running the file. They also leave a hint on the challenge name “strings it”. This is a hint because I know strings is a command from the Binutils of the GNU Operating System. If you type man strings, this comes up.
By reading briefly the manual it is possible to see that this command returns to the user all the strings that are in the file given as an argument.
After reading the manual I decided to run the command “strings strings” which is basically the command strings on the file strings. This command returned an enormous amount of strings making it too difficult to find the flag.
To solve this I decided to combine this command with the pipe and grep commands of the Linux terminal, as such:
The image source can be found here.
Thank you very much for reading!
Cheers,
MRegra
