Tags: misc 

Rating:

# Captcha Generator – *Write-up by @terjanq*

## Description
The challenge was about `human face recognition`. The author's intention was to write a program able to determine whether we can see a human on the image or not-human. For the first case the answer should be `1` and for the second one `0`. The difficulty was that we had to process each given picture in relatively short amount of time, because the connection was dropping after some time. The input format was an image encoded in `base64`.

On the IRC channel, I noticed that people were complaining about those timeouts because their programs were too slow.. In my solution I had no any issue with that :)

## Solution
If you are willing to see a cool tool for human face recognition I have to disappoint you. You won't find one here... **I didn't use any external tool!** I just used the fact that images database was relatively small and that `base64` string of the same image was always identical – no any `meta-data` added.
So, I wrote a program which was ''remembering'' each processed image into [images.txt] file, and for each new instance of the program this file was loaded as a `images dictionary`. Each image was labeled by `1` or `0` value and the labeling was done by myself, **by my own hands! :)** It didn't take much time to pass the test. Also some images were kind of beautiful so solving the challenge was very satisfying! I even decoded them into [images/] folder.

I used two ways of displaying an image. The first one was about converting the image to colored ASCII and displaying it inside the terminal, but the second one was just writing the data into actually existing image file [image.jpg], where if a picture has been changed, my Image Viewer was automatically reloading the context. But the second option was done with quite a delay, so I prefer the console outputted photo :) To convert the image into ASCII code I used the `img2txt` tool.

This is how my workstation looked like:

![workstation.png]

Pretty awesome, huh?

## Code

Full code of [captcha.py] is as following:
```python
from pwn import *
import base64
import os

images = open("images.txt", "r")

setm = images.read().strip();
setm = setm.split('\n')
setm = list(map(lambda x: tuple(x.split(',')), setm))
setm = dict(setm)

p = remote('103.5.112.91', 1340)

print p.recvuntil("no human!\n")

images = open("images.txt", "a");

for i in xrange(100):
b = p.recvuntil("\n\n")
b = b.replace("\n", "")

x = setm.get(b.strip())

print x
if x != '0' and x !='1':
os.system("img2txt image.jpg -H 70 -W 200")
x = raw_input('So what is it? ')
f = open("image.jpg", "w")
f.write(base64.b64decode(b))
f.close()
images.write('{},{}'.format(b.replace("\n", ""),x))
p.send(x)
else:
p.sendline(x)
```

## Flag
With some help of my program, I was able to easily pass the tests and the flag was: **xiomara{you_just_processed_an_image}**

[workstation.png]: <./workstation.png>
[images/]: <./images/>
[captcha.py]: <./captcha.py>
[image.jpg]: <./image.jpg>
[images.txt]: <./images.txt>

Original writeup (https://github.com/terjanq/Flag-Capture/tree/master/Xiomara%202018/Captcha%20Generator#captcha-generator--write-up-by-terjanq).