2024-Qualified

Full Prompt:

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How to solve:

At first glance, this looks to be Base64 Encoded data. My first instinct is to use CyberChef and start running recipies on it. So lets get baking!

The output looks like a bunch of gobbledygook, or does it?!?! For anyone who is unaware or have not worked on reversing before, there is this concept of “Magic Bytes” which are basically the first few bytes of a file to signify it’s type. Looking at the output a little closer, you can see that it starts with PK␃␄ signifying that it is a zip file.

Let’s keep baking!

Oh look! There is a file! Let’s download it and check out it’s contents!

Hmm. This seems a bit odd. Looks like it could be binary or some form of “ascii” art. Let’s try zooming out in word pad first and see if there is an image.

Woah! A QR code! But aren’t QR codes normally square? Is there a way that we can make this be square? Let’s try doing some good old-fashioned find and replace. I’m thinking of replacing all the 0s with a space.

Hmm. Still looks a little rectangular. Let’s try zooming out even more!

Now that’s a good looking QR code! Let’s scan it and see where it takes us! Since I like to use my computer and don’t want to use my phone. I’ll snip the QR code and save it as a picture so I can use an online QR code reader. I will use https://qrscanner.net/

Awesome! More stuff that looks to be Base64 data! Let’s go bake some more!

More decoding?!?!?! Well, this appears to be hexadecimal values, which means they can be converted to their ASCII equivalents. Lucky for us, we can add that to our recipe to bake!

There we go! We finally got the flag!

My thoughts:

Kudos to whomever made this challenge! It was fun and definitely required some out of the box thinking to store a QR code at max zoom out in Notepad.