CTF = Capture The Flag
(I didn't know what it stood for at first).
Google CTF 2019
61–70 of 140 posts
Re: Google CTF 2019
#62Dig at Apple from the third stage of the beginners' quest; "Your first thought is "Why does the display stand need to announce its price? And exactly how much does 999 dollars convert to in Xenonivian Bucklets?"
Stuck on this one, can see readme.flag but not sure how to proceed
Same. As far as I can tell, none of the usual restricted shell escape tricks work, so you just have to search through all the binaries on the system until you find one you can abuse to print the file contents, and that seems like more of a time sink than it's worth.
Re: Google CTF 2019
#63Does someone do in-depth posts/videos/talks about any of these (Google or FB) CTF challenges by breaking up what is happening, what, why and how they tried per challenege and how did they finally come to the solution step-by-step? These things have always intimidated me and I'd love to know more.
I started streaming it yesterday on my Twitch channel, but I was asked not to by a Google employee. I've been working through the Beginner's Quest instead, which is actually a lot of fun and has a cute story. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/442406188 if anyone wants to see the broadcast from yesterday.
Thanks for the tip on using iconv. I spent an hour trying to figure out which command to use for that README.flag! Learnt something new!
Re: Google CTF 2019
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stuck on this one, can see readme.flag but not sure how to proceed
Same. As far as I can tell, none of the usual restricted shell escape tricks work, so you just have to search through all the binaries on the system until you find one you can abuse to print the file contents, and that seems like more of a time sink than it's worth.
Use iconv.
Re: Google CTF 2019
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started streaming it yesterday on my Twitch channel, but I was asked not to by a Google employee. I've been working through the Beginner's Quest instead, which is actually a lot of fun and has a cute story. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/442406188 if anyone wants to see the broadcast from yesterday.
Thanks for the tip on using iconv. I spent an hour trying to figure out which command to use for that README.flag! Learnt something new!
Always happy to help! <3
Re: Google CTF 2019
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same. As far as I can tell, none of the usual restricted shell escape tricks work, so you just have to search through all the binaries on the system until you find one you can abuse to print the file contents, and that seems like more of a time sink than it's worth.
Use iconv.
LOL; I used split in the temp directory to create files of a single byte each and ran md5sum on them.
That's quite a bit more straightforward :)
Re: Google CTF 2019
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use iconv.
LOL; I used split in the temp directory to create files of a single byte each and ran md5sum on them. That's quite a bit more straightforward :)
Well I spent an hour trying out as many commands as possible before giving up. Then came across this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252612 and went through his Twitch recordings to see if he could get past this stage. That is how I learnt about iconv. :)
Re: Google CTF 2019
#68I’m always amazed how a company that creates the world’s most popular mobile OS and web browser is unable to code a decent mobile webpage. Scrolling this page is sufferable, anchor links don’t work well, etc. Basic stuff. Look no further than G Suite, Google Cloud for more examples.
To be fair, the challenges are impossible to solve on a mobile phone so I am not sure why they should invest time and effort to make it mobile friendly.
It's not that hard to write a decent mobile page. It's often the result of over engineering.
Re: Google CTF 2019
#69I’m always amazed how a company that creates the world’s most popular mobile OS and web browser is unable to code a decent mobile webpage. Scrolling this page is sufferable, anchor links don’t work well, etc. Basic stuff. Look no further than G Suite, Google Cloud for more examples.
I have heard of this argument often, and I don't quite understand it. It's similar to saying "I'm always amazed at how a country that has the most number of Nobel prize winners has some citizens that can't do calculus" The people that work on Android and Chrome are not the people who work on websites. It's okay to say the website doesn't meet your expectations, but it's better to recognize that those are different pr…
Companies are not countries. People are hired in the first and born in the second.
Companies should be concerned when their actions don't match the narrative they are trying to sell about themselves. If the Mobile Web is important to Google (and it should be), it must be a company wide effort. The “that's not my department” excuse doesn't cut it.
Re: Google CTF 2019
#70The emoji virtual machine (step 3 or 4) is cool. I'm trying to understand what it does to speed it up.
I'm on that as well, for me it seems it just decodes some Unicode characters and does arithmetic to print the message, I don't know why it's taking so long or how can I speed it up.