Rating:
[Original Writeup with better formatting](https://lawfulwaffle.com/2020/07/22/csictf-writeups/#find32)
This challenge is very similar to challenges you’ll find on OverTheWire’s Bandit challenges. I highly recommend you go and check them out if challenges like this one stump you.
After ssh’ing in and running ls, you see a bunch of filenames made up of random characters:
![](https://lawfulwaffle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/find32-2.png)
Running ls -l shows the filenames and file sizes, along with other extra info. You’ll notice that one of the files is 10058 bytes, while the rest are 10000 bytes. MITS1KT3 has a bunch of text, so you have to grep for a pattern that will help you find a flag.
![](https://lawfulwaffle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/find32-3.png)
Grepping for curly braces, a simple way to find flag-like strings, reveals{not_the_flag} and {user2:AAE976A5232713355D58584CFE5A5}. That’s the password for user2, so you have to login to their account:
![](https://lawfulwaffle.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/find32-5.png)
user2’s home directory has a bunch of seemingly identical text files. The task is to figure out which one differs and what that different string is. The following shell command 1.) Prints out all file contents, 2.) Sorts them alphabetically, and 3.) Removes all of the lines that have duplicates
`cat * | sort | uniq -u`
(Wrapping that in the flag format gives you points)
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