Tags: rc3ctf
Rating: 4.0
# 100 - Salad
## Problem Statement
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” (I.ii.141) Julius Caesar in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Cipher Text: 7sj-ighm-742q3w4t
## Overview
Decrypt a Caesar cipher with a custom alphabet
## Solution
From the problem statement, we can reasonably infer that the ciphertext is to be decrypted in a manner similar to that of a caesar cipher. However, since the flag has to begin with uppercase "RC3-2016", we conclude that a custom alphabet was used for encryption. We take a look at the charset of the ciphertext (excluding the dashes - those don't get shifted), and find that it fits within
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789
Our next step is to find out the correct shift. This python snippet does just that, and prints out the message if it contains "RC3-2016".
import string
alphabet = string.ascii_lowercase + string.ascii_uppercase + string.digits
ctext = "7sj-ighm-742q3w4t"
def shift(n):
message = ""
for index, char in enumerate(ctext):
if char == "-":
message += char
else:
message += alphabet[(alphabet.index(ctext[index])+n)%len(alphabet)]
return message.upper()
for i in range(len(alphabet)):
message = shift(i)
if "RC3" in message:
print(message)
Running it returns the flag:
RC3-2016-ROMANGOD
## Flag
RC3-2016-ROMANGOD
