 What's going on everybody my name is John Hammond a little bit more rice teacat panda ctf some more challenges in the cryptography category This challenge is called wrong way for 150 points doesn't have a ton of solves So it's a little bit harder to do I guess esoteric kind of obscure It says it did you know that you've been going the wrong way the entire time and we're given just this text Which doesn't help all that much Maybe this was tough to figure out. I certainly had a hard time figuring out props to my teammate who kind of discovered Well, we could go ahead and go the wrong way and that when we're normally trying to Encode or decode or work with some variables We will decode them with base 64 if they look strange or odd in our case. We want to encode this So I'm actually going to create this variable. I'll just say See whatever we want to call that we'll paste that in here and see dot encode with UTF 8 will make it bites for us UTF-8 there now We can go ahead and pass this to base 64 the Python 3 module in this case and we can go ahead and encode that So let's go ahead and actually do just that. I'll take this kind of command here and let's base 64 dot b64 encode This and that is literally our flag that we kind of need to massage and put in the right format It says our TCP unexpected places. That's very strange and very odd So literally what the flag would end up looking like is when we put in the correct Syntax here is unexpected Places did I type all that right unexpected? Who cares? Okay unexpected places That is the flag that we would go ahead and submit for that challenge the other ones that some interesting tears or tea has a Very strange challenge prompt as all the others seem to have as well and we're given text It looks like base 32 we can tell that's base 32 because it's not using really all the numbers It's available to it. It all has pretty much capital letters That's what we're constantly going to see for base 32 and there's an equal sign trailing that could be used for padding If you see a lot of equal signs and much more than base 64 I think you'll see a max of two in that case then you're certainly looking at base 32 So let me actually just fire that up in cyber chef and that's going to be kind of a great and quick and easy tool to Be able to look at these because otherwise be doing a lot of encoding and decoding and Python This just makes it super quick and super simple. So when you're looking at that within cyber chef We know okay theoretically we have base 32 and let's go ahead and grab that We could use base 32 from base 32. So we decode it and this looks like again base 64 What I'm actually used is just going to search for the term from so I got a quick listing of all the potential Bases we might be able to convert to or from from base 64 Doesn't particularly give us anything interesting or worthwhile But we know hey the characters set that it's using is probably pretty close to that as a base So you could use base 62 again still nothing particularly interesting with that output base 58 is actually what returns us Something interesting. Let me remove that base 62 there. So now you can see we have more output This looks pretty similar to base 64 or something else. We might expect. Let me try that base 64 That didn't work base 62. We could throw in there. Let me remove the Base 64 in that case. So now we have something that again looks like base 64 Place that in there now. We have other text that is using other punctuation marks and other characters That is normally a telltale sign for me that we're looking at base 85 That has much more punctuation marks in there So I'll grab that one from base 85 and finally throughout all of our conversions and hexadecimal or Whatever whatever bases we tend to be manipulating with we can see our flag. That's some salty tea I blame all those tears that is our flag. We can go and submit that Just a lot of poking around within cyber chef that was kind of a little bit of a Trial and error or process of elimination because we were trying bases that might get us somewhere if I could see well I don't have as much printable bytes as I would want in that case Maybe we could go down route to X or things or maybe that's some sort of data that we can manipulate It's encrypted or encoded in some way But I wanted to poke around and try all those other encodings just in case next one says that's a lot of stuff In this case, we're given just a ton of numbers when I first looked at this I thought this was odd because well, I was seeing Numbers that all seem to be octal. They all seem to be less than eight But that was even the wrong way to go a teammate kind of noticed So I see the number 20 over and over again And I thought that was odd because between every set of threes we have 20 in that case And I was thinking oh, well, maybe that 20 because that's that's a space when you refer to it as hex So maybe this is in fact hex. I'll go fire back up to cyber chef I'll clear out this recipe here and I'll paste that in as our new input now in this case We're working with hex so let me go ahead and decode that from hex and now you'll see we have more numbers That have just simply been decoded that is in this case Actually octal again, you can see hey, this is all less than eight for every single digits. So let's go from octal Drag that in and of course this looks like base 64 or some of the other Encodings that we might have seen base 64. Let's go from that and now we do have the flag for that challenge Conversions are cool cats. So that was just a little bit of spice within cyber chef if you haven't seen cyber chef before It's honestly awesome There are a ton of great things and if you don't exactly know what you want to be working with you could try magic Depending on the case or challenge that you're working with you could see that can track down some worthwhile information and even that okay It just found the flag without us doing anything else you could specify depth You can specify intensive mode to try a bunch of things But in that case it would just crank out and find that our TCP you can even specify that as a crib maybe if you're looking for it and Magic might very well just work for you at least something worthy to try and put on your check list for capture the flag So thank you guys for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. That's the end of it If you did like this video, please do like comment subscribe Join the discord server. There's a link in the description. Follow me on the Twitter on the Instagram on the Facebook's And the YouTube obviously Thanks for watching guys. I'll see you in the next video