Needle in a Haystack

Writeup for Needle in a Haystack (Rev) - HackTheBox Cyber Apocalypse - Intergalactic Chase CTF (2023) 💜

Description

You've obtained an ancient alien Datasphere, containing categorized and sorted recordings of every word in the forgotten intergalactic common language. Hidden within it is the password to a tomb, but the sphere has been worn with age and the search function no longer works, only playing random recordings. You don't have time to search through every recording - can you crack it open and extract the answer?

Solution

Uses time(0) and rand and a big array of words. Used some chatGPT to convert code to python but then realised we can just break in GDB where the words are loaded and check the results, e.g.

breakrva 0x224b

Then either print words and manually search:

x/203s 0x555555557008

Alternatively, search with GDB:

search "HTB"
Searching for value: 'HTB'
haystack        0x555555557418 'HTB{d1v1ng_1nt0_th3_d4tab4nk5}'
haystack        0x555555558418 'HTB{d1v1ng_1nt0_th3_d4tab4nk5}'

Flag: HTB{d1v1ng_1nt0_th3_d4tab4nk5}