Hitting any key outputs it, and when you input any 6 characters, the screen turns to snow. Turns out, the string is what shows up when the binary boots up. Qemu-system-i386 -hda msdos.disk -m 64 -L. The intro blurb helpfully mentions several emulators that can potentially run it, and I found that qemu did the best job of it.Īfter creating a base DOS image with qemu-img create -f qcow msdos.disk 2M, I ran the image with Ugh, the 90's called and asked for their stuff back. This floppy has one! Hold on, we're getting a phone call. Before anything else, a quick look into the binary reveals interesting strings: We hope you're enjoying the PancakesCon 3 CTF! You were looking for a flag? The challenge file is identified as a DOS/MBR boot sector. Someone (I was freaking out and didn’t catch who it was) suggested alternating the case of the input, so I tried PaNcAkEs and the result mirrored the case alternation with that same german word - Capital C Clue! Following the logic, if input PANCAKES gives me output verliebt, input verliebt gives me…īootselfie is so much fun, and I still haven’t cracked it, so I’m not going to link to any spoilers until I figure it out! Have fun, and enjoy your PANCAKES, trying the known parts of the flag might reveal something about the underlying encoding - and noticed that the result started with characters that formed a word, and that word had the same length as the flag prefix - a clue? Here's your first hint: you'll probably have to wait until 1997 to figure this one out, but much after 1997 and the Internet can probably help you. You'll probably need to interact with the program a bit. I've hidden a flag in this program, but it's not going to be all that easy to find just with ResEdit. Despite having 16 GB of RAM, Microsoft Word still takes up roughly half of it.Īnyway, because in the future we're stuck at home due to a worldwide pandemic (no, not the Internet, there is ANOTHER one), we had a competition for finding fun things in computer programs. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. Nearly all computers in the world are connected together through a network called the Internet. Depending on when you read this, you may have heard of it. The Mac is still a pretty big deal, and can still read this program (but hasn't been able to run it for a while). We even have characters for clown faces and smiling piles of poo. Unicode really seems to have worked, for the most part. That's right we have more RAM than you have hard drive space. I'm from the DISTANT FUTURE, where normal computers run at 2-4 GHz and 16 GB is considered a medium amount of RAM. While going through this exercise, I poked around inside the provided challenge file, and found a few interesting strings in it: Hello there. In the end, a lot of googling produced a blog post where someone went through the steps for doing it, with provided links for pre-extracted disk images of System 7. Given that our challenge file is made to run on System 7, this was quite the issue for me, and it took me almost two hours to get it running properly. MacOS can unpack bin files just fine, but it seems that the code that can handle smi files is long gone, and the sea unpacker can’t handle smi. Like tar.gz, these are double packed containers, an smi or sea file inside a bin. You see, while System 6 images are distributed inside binary packages with extension sea.bin and the provided extractor tool run just fine on these, System 7 is distributed in a different file format of extension smi.bin. The Getting Started docs were helpful, but unfortunately these things bitrot faster than you can say “bitrot”, and while I could download the base emulator and images of the different OS versions just fine, the tools to extract the actual runnable disk images don’t work anymore. To get our little challenge to actually run, I’d have to go figure out what a Mini vMac emulator is and how to run System 7 on it. The image runs well under Mini vMac using any System 7 base operating system.”. The challenge description told us that the file was “a 68k Mac application on an 800k floppy disk image which can be used on any emulator which supports them.
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