NOVA CTF {2024} — Cipher Quest

REVERSE ENGINEERING CHALLENGE

KISHORERAM
3 min readMar 21, 2024

Challenge Description:
Alex,a cybersecurity analyst, received an email with an attachment named confidential. Upon opening, it revealed an attachment .Your task is to reverse engineer the attachment and uncover the hidden password. Join Alex in this “Cipher Quest” to decode the attachment and reveal the secret password.

Photo by rc.xyz NFT gallery on Unsplash

Analysing the File:

ELF stands for Executable and Linkable Format. It is a common file format for executable files, object code, shared libraries, and core dumps. ELF files are used on Linux and other Unix-based systems. The ELF format is versatile and can be executed on various processor types. It supports big-endian, little-endian, 32-bit, and 64-bit architectures systems and different CPUs. The ELF format has several capabilities, including dynamic linking, dynamic loading, imposing run-time control on a program, and an improved method for creating shared libraries.The ELF format is the standard binary format on operating systems such as Linux.

Strings:

Looking into Main Function

File opened in IDA and analysed

Looking into main function and program flow

These are the functions that contains Fake flags. You know if you tried decoding the base64 strings.

This is theFunction to decode Base64

This is the base-64 encrypted text we need to decode to get the secret password.

Now enclose the flag in Flag Format.

Finally we found the flag as
NOVA{Revers3_Archit3ct_Master_mind_Unlock3d}

Thanks For Reading :)

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Best of luck in capturing flags ahead!!!

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KISHORERAM

Cybersecurity & Networking enthusiast | Avid learner| Looking for opportunities