bandit level 11

The next challenge involves translating the text in data.txt from its rot13 encrypted state. Rot13 simply involves rotating characters 13 letters from the original value. The hint helpfully reccommends the tr command, which translates characters between two sets. Using the command below, we can “decrypt” the text.

bandit11@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | tr "[a-zA-Z]" "[n-za-mN-ZA-M]"
The password is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (actual password is not shown)
bandit11@bandit:~$

bandit level 10

The next clue informs us that the data.txt file contains the password enocded in base 64. We merely have to cat the file contents and pipe the results to the base64 command, using the -d switch to decode the string.

bandit10@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | base64 -d
The password is XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (actual password is not shown)
bandit10@bandit:~$

bandit level 1

The goal for moving from level 1 to level 2 is to find a file named “-“ in the bandit1 directory and inspecting the contents for the password. Anyone familiar with linux is probably aware that a dash is often interpreted by many utilities as an indication to read from stdin, so how are we to get the contents? Honestly, I couldn’t remember off the top of my head. Just for grins I tried quoting the dash, but that had no effect. After another minute or two, came up with this:

bandit1@bandit:~$ ls
-
bandit1@bandit:~$ cat "-"
^C
bandit1@bandit:~$ man cat
bandit1@bandit:~$ cat ./-
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (actual password not shown)
bandit1@bandit:~$

bandit level 0

I remember stumbling across overthewire.org quite a while ago and starting quite a few of the games simultaneously. I made my way through various parts of the different games, but eventually started losing track of my progress and never finished any of them. After feeling inspired to try my hand at war games again, I rediscovered the site and decided to take a more linear approach. I’m going to take the recommended course through the games and document my progress here, for no other reason than that hopefully the act of writing down the solutions might help me to retain the information.

The first game is bandit. Level 0 is simply the act of connecting to the server and finding the password for level 1 in the readme file. Simple enough.

bandit0@bandit:~$ ls
readme
bandit0@bandit:~$ cat readme
xxxxxxxxxxxx (actual password not shown)
bandit0@bandit:~$