Description

Susan Landau (born 1954) is an American mathematician, engineer, cybersecurity policy expert, and Bridge Professor in Cybersecurity and Policy at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She previously worked as a Senior Staff Privacy Analyst at Google. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a visiting scholar at the Computer Science Department, Harvard University in 2012. - Wikipedia Entry

Challenge: Connect to our webserver and understand the concerns of this mathematician and privacy expert.

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The webserver brings us to a welcome page which then directs us to a login page that requires a username. We cannot continue unless something is entered and they provide a clue which is probably important in figuring out the correct login

**"Welcome Cyber Heroine, you get more details when you don't choose your name to be heroine but your 'cyberheroine' username"** seems to be important but for quite a while I wasn't sure what it meant.

Entering a random username, we now get two links, one to an "easy path" and one to a "difficult path". Going the easy path provides us with a dead end and going to the hard path allows us to "request help".

Requesting help gives us another dead end but now we have another hint, there is an image of a gingerbread man and inspecting the element shows that the image is called *9-tough-cookie*. Viewing the site's cookies I saw that there was a PHP session (which is very common and I assumed not relevant) and a csrf_token which was a lot more interesting. CSRF stands for cross-site request forgery which is a type of web attack where a site is only verifying permissions based on a http cookie/token. So if we can alter that token to something important we should be able to access the flag.

I tried a couple different login names just to see if the token changes at all but it would always stay as *40c331964b7560a4d3baaae420d5e3cd*. So next step was to try and crack this hash and see if it provides any information. Using crackstation, which is just an online hash cracker, we see that it is an md5 hash which decrypts to *"hack this"*. Side note, in cracking this hash I was expecting it to have a title like user or student which I could then alter to admin or the name of the woman that this challenge was based on.

Without having any more info, I went back to the login page with the hint to see if I could figure out what I needed. It took a bit of trial and error which consisted of 'heroine', 'cyberheroine', 'susan landau', and any combination of those before realizing that I probably needed to encrypt them in md5 before submitting. Swapping the token in the request help page to the md5 hash of 'cyberheroine' (*09a206b401aaa7b5315e1d814ce16896*) I got the flag *chctf{U_a53_$ucc3$$ful!!!}*.