This challenge makes use of zero width characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_space
For this challenge 2 different types of zero width characters were used, they are shown below and are actually in the quotes. If you copy and paste the characters below and put them into https://www.diffchecker.com/ you can see them. The 2 characters were used to represent binary data, the binary data is in the description text below.
ZW_S = '' #zero-width space ZW_NJ = '' #zero-width non-joiner
000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
cat challengegen.txt | python ChallengeNumberZero.py
The 3 lines of python code required to solve the challenge can be found at the end of the challenge generator. Specifically all you need to do is remove all 0's from the file, replace all zero width non-joiner 0x200c
characters with 0 and all zero width space characters 0x200b
with 1. Then paste the text into any online binary to ASCII converter.
flag is: MCA{W@ttchYEE_Cl1p_B00rd!.?}