Over The Wire - Bandit - Level 11#

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

Steps#

This exercise is the first one that have (and teaches us) about cryptography. Not that we need to understand cryptography, but we need to decrypt a file. The file data.txt is encrypted in base64, which have a command base64. In the manual for base64 we have the option -d:

-d, --decode
              decode data

So, we use this option to decode the file data.txt, it will be something like:

base64 -d data.txt

And with that, the password for the next level is revealed.