August 15, 2020 7 min to read

Arab Security Cyber WarGames 2020 Forensics Challenges Writeup

These challenges were solved by Medoic and Magdi

This is the write up of the for the forensics challenges in the ASC CTF qualification round. There was 3 forensics chellenges.

let’s go.

Fingerprint–> 300 Pts:

Type : Forensics
Name : Finger Print
Descreption : Can You Spoof My Finger Print ???
Points : 300

At first we get an archive file containg 7 images of fingerprints. all the images are JPG expect 1 PNG image.

Checking the metadata and exif data of the jpg images we found that Slices Group Name of 3.jpg containing challenge.jpg

This makes 3.jpg an interesting file for us
Checking the strings of 3.jpg we find a base64 encoded string at the end of the file

Decoding the base64 string we get a series of hex digits

Decoding the hex it appears from the magic bytes that this a Rar file

Saving the hex as a file we get a rar file
Opening the rar file it appears to be password protected

Cracking the Rar password:

First thing we had to extract the password hash of the rar file using rar2john

sudo rar2john 3.rar > passwordhash.txt

Then lets attack the password using john and rockyou.txt wordlist

sudo john passwordhash.txt — wordlist /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt — format=RAR5

The password decrypted is :komputer
Extracting the rar file we get a text file called txt.txt
the file then contains the flag

ASCWG{F0Ren$ics_I$FUn;)}

Meownetwork —> 300 Pts

Type : forensics
Name : meownetwork
Description : A hacker managed to get into meownetwork and leaked sensitive files of their respected baord members. The hacker uses ancient floppy disk technology, however our security team managed to get a disk image of the files he leaked. Can you find out what really leaked?
Points : 300

We received a rar file containing disk.img

We then mounted the img using FTK imager

Opening the mounted disk we find 5 images of cats

Checking the exif data nothing interesting appears.
Lets then check if the images contain any hidden data using steghide and an empty password

steghide extract -sf 1.jpg

All images appear to contain a text file called –> not_the_flag_imagenumber.txt

Lets extract all the text files

steghide extract -sf 1.jpg steghide extract -sf 2.jpg steghide extract -sf 3.jpg steghide extract -sf 4.jpg steghide extract -sf 5.jpg

Opening the text files they appear to be base64 encoded
Decoding and combining them we get a new image file

Trying steghide with empty password , extraction of data fails

Lets try to bruteforce the password of steghide using stegcracker

stegcracker image.jpg /usr/share/wordlists/rockyou.txt

We successfully find the password: labeba

Opening the extracted file it contains the flag

ASCWG{F10ppy_d1$k!!_th@t’$_s0m3_n0$t@1g!a_stuFF}

The-Impossible-Dream

level: 2
title: The-Impossible-Dream
Description: The notorious terrorist group known as the 10 rings got their 1337 hax0r 5 to hack into Stark Industries and steal the some sensitive files inlcuding the blueprints for the aRC Reactor second model, the hackers messed up the data badly and encrypted the files. Can you retrieve the files?
points: 600

This challenge is one hell of a ride, we have a missing headers’ file and we need to fix it first to get to the challenge.

We start of by importing the file as raw data into audacity, it’ll identify the file as a WAV file and play the song (the song is The impossible dream for Andy Williams). however when running “file” utility it can’t recognize the file.

We need to edit fix the magic numbers in the header

As shown above the file is missing the RIFF.i hex values and also missing the data.i hex values which are “ 52 49 46 46” and “ 64 61 74 61” respectively.

Fixing the header, we get nothing else. Nothing hidden in the audio itself. So we need to use deepsound.

And we get an img file named challenge.img, we extract it, and moving it to my kali box we find out it’s an EXT4 filesystem.

Extracting the filesystem using “binwalk” utility, we get a directory called _challenge.img.extracted/ viewing the contents of the directory we get 3 files.

the pastebin.txt file has a weird string that can’t be decoded and it’s not a hash, I tried to unrar ‘ju$t_an0th3r_f!l3.rar’ but it needed a password so cracking it with “johntheripper”, we get a password gasparin

extracting the contents of the rar file we get 3 pictures that are basically memes. They serve as a rabbit hole and hold nothing important whatsoever (they actually have text files that can be extracted using “stegosuite”, I know so because I made the challenge).

Going back to the file called Null, when usingstrings utility we find it has the flag.txt file

So it’s a RAR file, looking at its header the magic numbers don’t exist, so adding them will fix it 52 61 72 21

Attempting to extract Flag.txt we find the file is password protected

so now we need to get the password. We looked at the other RAR file but it’s a rabbit hole so we are left with the pastebin.txt file

It looks like a hash but it’s not, so we need to take a step back. Reading the description again we find some interesting stuff, “hax0r 5”, “aRC reactor second model”, and last but not least encrypted. So it might be using an encryption technique like RC2 and the key is 5. Going to cyberchef