SixFoisNeuf

Totally irregular blog on computers and security


AlexCTF Writeup

Posted on Feb 8, 2017

The only challenge I solved during this CTF was the “unVM_me” reverse engineering challenge (finally! Something other than crypto!)

We were given a pyc (Python Bytecode) file containing the flag. Executing it asked for the flag, and told us if it was right or wrong.

Decompiling the bytecode

I used PyCDC to decompile the pyc file. This gave me the following source code (I modified it to add some error checking to help with debugging):

import md5
md5s = [
    0x831DAA3C843BA8B087C895F0ED305CE7L,
    0x6722F7A07246C6AF20662B855846C2C8L,
    0x5F04850FEC81A27AB5FC98BEFA4EB40CL,
    0xECF8DCAC7503E63A6A3667C5FB94F610L,
    0xC0FD15AE2C3931BC1E140523AE934722L,
    0x569F606FD6DA5D612F10CFB95C0BDE6DL,
    0x68CB5A1CF54C078BF0E7E89584C1A4EL,
    0xC11E2CD82D1F9FBD7E4D6EE9581FF3BDL,
    0x1DF4C637D625313720F45706A48FF20FL,
    0x3122EF3A001AAECDB8DD9D843C029E06L,
    0xADB778A0F729293E7E0B19B96A4C5A61L,
    0x938C747C6A051B3E163EB802A325148EL,
    0x38543C5E820DD9403B57BEFF6020596DL]
print 'Can you turn me back to python ? ...'
flag = raw_input('well as you wish.. what is the flag: ')
if len(flag) > 69:
    print 'nice try'
    exit()
if len(flag) % 5 != 0:
    print 'nice try'
    exit()
for i in range(0, len(flag), 5):
    s = flag[i:i + 5]
    if int('0x' + md5.new(s).hexdigest(), 16) != md5s[i / 5]:
        print "Error : %s" % (s)
        print "You entered : %s "% ('0x' + md5.new(s).hexdigest())
        print "Expected : %s " % (hex(md5s[i/5]))
        print 'nice try'
        exit()
        continue
print 'Congratz now you have the flag'

Getting the flag

We can see a list of 13 MD5 hashes. The codes seems to check the MD5 hash of each group of 5 characters from the user string against the corresponding hash in the list. This means we need to crack every hash and that each should give us a 5-character string.

I used HashKiller to crack the hashes (I guess you could also try bruteforcing them, which shouldn’t be too long knowing the first characters were necessarily ALEXCTF{)

This gave us the following flag: ALEXCTF{dv5d4s2vj8nk43s8d8l6m1n5l67ds9v41n52nv37j481h3d28n4b6v3k}

Inputting it back into the program proved it was indeed the correct flag!

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