SP-GCTF-2021

Writeup and working files for SP Gryphons CTF 2021. Note that some files are legitimate malware so please exercise caution when downloading. Recommended to download in a VM.

Writeup for Script Kiddie

Solve Script Download

Challenge Description: Are you a script kiddie or a math god?

nc c1.2021.gryphonctf.com 9007

Connecting to the host and port, we can see the following output:

Welcome math god! You will be given several questions and you have 5 seconds to 
solve each question for the flag! Good luck! :P
Solve [x] ADD [y]
>

So based on this, we can write a script to parse the data input.

import socket

host = 'c1.2021.gryphonctf.com'
port = 9007

bot = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
bot.connect((host,port))

The above code initiates a connection to the bot (referenced from online scripts). Thereafter, we can try to get the "equation" we want to parse

#for first instance only
data = bot.recv(1024)

The above code ignores Welcome math god! You will be given several questions and you have 5 seconds to solve each question for the flag! Good luck! :P for the first instance. Again, the number 1024 is arbitrary. Read the recv() docs for more. The initial string is in bytecode so a utf-8 decode is necessary for operator substitution later on.

    #2nd line onwards, decode from bytestring and remove redunant chars
    challenge = bot.recv(1024).decode("utf-8").replace("[", "").replace("]", "")

    # tokenize words to list
    challenge_splitted = challenge.split()

We then proceed on to tokenize the symbols i.e. the word Solve, [x] which represents the first number, ADD/SUBTRACT/MULTIPLY/DIVIDE which is the operator and [y] which represents the second number in the equation. We also need to rid the brackets.

Thereafter, we can substitute the operator with the appropriate representation in Python (e.g. ADD -> +, SUBTRACT -> - and so on...)

# initalize variable 
    result = 0

    #substitutions
    if (challenge_splitted[2] == "DIVIDE"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) / int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "ADD"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) + int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "SUBTRACT"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) - int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "MULTIPLY"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) * int(challenge_splitted[3])
    else:
        print("Invalid operation")

Lastly, we re-encode the results and send it back to the server.

    str(result).encode('utf-8')
    bot.send(str(result).encode('utf-8'))

We need to place this in a loop since there is more than 1 question. So it will look something like this when put together.

#!/usr/bin/python2.7
import socket

host = 'c1.2021.gryphonctf.com'
port = 9007

bot = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
bot.connect((host,port))

#for first instance only
data = bot.recv(1024)

while True:
    #2nd line onwards, decode from bytestring and remove redunant chars
    challenge = bot.recv(1024).decode("utf-8").replace("[", "").replace("]", "")

    # tokenize words to list

    challenge_splitted = challenge.split()

    # initalize variable 
    result = 0

    #substitutions
    if (challenge_splitted[2] == "DIVIDE"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) / int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "ADD"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) + int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "SUBTRACT"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) - int(challenge_splitted[3])
    elif (challenge_splitted[2] == "MULTIPLY"):
        result = int(challenge_splitted[1]) * int(challenge_splitted[3])
    else:
        print("Invalid operation")

    str(result).encode('utf-8')


    bot.send(str(result).encode('utf-8'))

    #receive congrats message
    print(bot.recv(1024))

Note that the code causes an exception, but I was lazy to catch that. This gave us our flag at the end (I did not record this down).

Solves