Pragyan CTF 2019 - EXORcism

Description

My friend Alex needs your help very fast. He has been possessed by a ghost and the only way to save him is if you tell the flag to the ghost. Hurry up, time is running out!

We are given the file encoded.txt, which has 10000 lines, each line consists in a 0 or a 1.

Solution

The file starts with more than 1000 1s, then some 0 appears here and there. The first observation I did was that the number of subsequent 0s seemed to always be even.

I thought it was an esoteric language (as often happens in CTFs), but it wasn’t the case. My next idea was to rearrange the characters in a 100x100 square. The result looked promising but a bit confused, so I replaced all 1 with a white space. This gave a much more clearer output: a QR-code? I changed the 0 to be black squares and yes, it clearly gave me a QR-code!

This is the simple script I used.

f = open('./encoded.txt', 'r')

i = 0
s = ''
for line in f:
    if i % 100 == 0:
        print s.replace('1', ' ').replace('0', u"\u2588")
        s = ''
    s += line.strip()
    i += 1

f.close()

At this point I was a bit lazy: I printed the output directly on the terminal, took a screenshot and modified the height with GIMP (the image was elongated). Scanning the resulting QR-code gave me 160f15011d1b095339595138535f135613595e1a.

Given the name of the challenge, my idea was to xor the above string (after hex-decoding it) with the flag prefix (i.e. pctf{), which gave me flagf. So let’s try to xor it with flag:

pctf{wh4_50_53r1u5?}