OverTheWire: Bandit Level 10 → Level 11
The Bandit wargames are aimed at absolute beginners. It will teach the basics needed to be able to play other wargames.
Level Goal
The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt, which contains base64 encoded data
Commands you may need to solve this level
grep, sort, uniq, strings, base64, tr, tar, gzip, bzip2, xxd
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> whatis grep
grep (1) - print lines that match patterns
> whatis sort
sort (1) - sort lines of text files
> whatis uniq
uniq (1) - report or omit repeated lines
> whatis strings
strings (1) - print the sequences of printable characters in files
> whatis base64
base64 (1) - base64 encode/decode data and print to standard output
> whatis tr
tr (1) - translate or delete characters
> whatis tar
tar (1) - an archiving utility
> whatis gzip
gzip (1) - compress or expand files
> whatis bzip2
bzip2 (1) - a block-sorting file compressor, v1.0.8
> whatis xxd
xxd (1) - make a hexdump or do the reverse.
Note: All commands don’t have to be used to complete level
Helpful Reading Material
Bash base64 encoding and decoding
Solution
View the contents of the current working directory
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bandit10@bandit:~$ ls
data.txt
View the data that is present in the file
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bandit10@bandit:~$ cat data.txt
VGhlIHBhc3N3b3JkIGlzIElGdWt3S0dzRlc4TU9xM0lSRnFyeEUxaHhUTkViVVBSCg==
Looking at the content it looks like a string of random characters but from the question we know that the data is base64 encoded. We can decode this data using the base64 command that is present on Unix systems. The -d flag is used to decode the data
(For detailed information on base64 encoding refer to the attached article)
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bandit10@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | base64 -d
The password is IFukwKGsFW8MOq3IRFqrxE1hxTNEbUPR
We have found the password for the next level !!
Logout of the current session and use the password of user bandit11 to access the next level
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> ssh bandit11@bandit.labs.overthewire.org -p 2220
This is a OverTheWire game server. More information on http://www.overthewire.org/wargames
bandit11@bandit.labs.overthewire.org's password: IFukwKGsFW8MOq3IRFqrxE1hxTNEbUPR