Over The Wire - Bandit - Level 05#

Level Goal#

The password for the next level is stored in the only human-readable file in the inhere directory. Tip: if your terminal is messed up, try the “reset” command.

Commands you may need to solve this level#

ls , cd , cat , file , du , find

Steps#

(I know what happens in the next level, so we gonna play simple in this one)

The goal says that there’s a human-readable file in the inhere directory with the password for the next level. This means that the file is not a file in machine code language.

Machine code file is kinda garbage when you try to read it, so we will try to find a simple text file. First we enter the inhere folder with cd:

cd inhere

Listing the files in the folder with ls we have a list of files:

-file00
-file01
-file02
-file03
-file04
-file05
-file06
-file07
-file08
-file09

This time, we will use a command called file, this shows the details and information of that file. The problem here is that file < -file00 does not work, this time we need to use another way to show the console we don’t want to call an option, we will use --:

file -- -file00

So using the command file in each one of the files we have the following information:

-file00: data
-file01: OpenPGP Public Key
-file02: OpenPGP Public Key
-file03: data
-file04: data
-file05: data
-file06: data
-file07: ASCII text
-file08: data
-file09: data

The information we gathered follows:

data : machine code, not human-readable
OpenPGP Public Key : key for encryption, not human-readable
ASCII text : character encoding standard, human-readable

With that, we have the file we want -file07, we read it with cat:

cat < -file07

Resulting with the password for the next level.