PicoCTF2018 Miscellaneous You can't see me

PicoCTF2018 Miscellaneous You can't see me



Objective:
'...reading transmission... Y.O.U. .C.A.N.'.T. .S.E.E. .M.E.  ...transmission ended...' Maybe something lies in /problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f.




Solution:


Let's LS the folder and see whats in there

ls by itself it shows no files in the directory

@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$ ls
@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$

ok now lets do -la which returns long format with while not ignoring . files

@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$ ls -la
total 60
drwxr-xr-x   2 root       root        4096 Mar 25 19:57 .
-rw-rw-r--   1 hacksports hacksports    57 Mar 25 19:57 .
drwxr-x--x 556 root       root       53248 Mar 25 19:58 ..

lets try to cat it now

@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$ cat .
cat: .: Is a directory

we know from the last ls output its a file not a directory lets see if we are missing a space in the name by using this -Q switch
-Q encloses the file name in double quotes

Ah ha there is a space in the file name

@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$ ls -laQ
total 60
drwxr-xr-x   2 root       root        4096 Mar 25 19:57 "."
-rw-rw-r--   1 hacksports hacksports    57 Mar 25 19:57 ".  "
drwxr-x--x 556 root       root       53248 Mar 25 19:58 ".."

so lets cat all files in the directory that start with a *

@pico-2018-shell:/problems/you-can-t-see-me_1_a7045a1e39ce834c26556a81c2b3a74f$ cat .*
cat: .: Is a directory
picoCTF{j0hn_c3na_paparapaaaaaaa_paparapaaaaaa_f01e45c4}

Boom flag time