The Challenge

Challenge Metadata

The challenge was written by spipm and got 119 solves.

Here is the challenge description:

A creaky old bot is zooming in and out of an eye chart. "Can you read the bottom line?" the doctor asks. "No way, " the bot replies. "At a certain distance my view becomes convoluted. Here, I'll make a screenshot." You and the doctor look at the screenshot. Can you tell what's wrong with the bot's visual processor?

What are we working with?

We are given a PNG file which shows some distorted imagery for what looks like text:

Assuming that we need to 'deblur' the text to read it, I start looking online.

Solution

Looking online for CTF image blurred I found this resource.

Scrolling through I found this entry: 13. Use SmartDeblur software to fix blurry on image.

Downloading SmartDeblur I put the image in and try to automatically deblur it...

Well, that didn't work... Lets try some different settings.

I select a portion of the image and drop the size to 10x10.

Flag: brck{4ppr04ch1tfr0M4D1ff3r3ntAngl3}