For 400 points, Olympic CTF provided the Make Similar challenge. The description was “Listen carefully and try to figure out. Hint: 120 LPM.”
The link pointed to a stream for an ogg file which played unintelligible beeps and static. The stream has been backed up with the challenge relevant data here.
First the key is to identify what the audio is. The hint makes it obvious that the data is some sort of fax. Going on this assumption, I found SeaTTY which would take the audio and convert it back into a weatherfax. Apparently meteorologists used to make use of this kind of software to transfer monochrome images. Sounds like the original Snapchat.
SeaTTY will take the playing audio and convert it back into a weather fax. I couldn’t get it to accept a file and translate that so I ended up using Stereo Mix on my computer to play the sounds into a VM running SeaTTY.
About 20 or so minutes later we take our decoded weather fax which looks something like this
Weather fax decoded from Olympic CTF’s Make Similar Challenge
The images should repeat given enough time but at this point I was intrigued by the encoded text. Out of instinct I assumed the text was uuencoded but it is in fact xxencoded.
xxencoded text in the weather fax
Tesseract’s output was close but overall had too many mistakes to be worthwhile. I ended up transcribing all of it by hand which led to a few mistakes. Because my text had some flaws and I was uudecoding it, I recieved completely incorrect files.
At this point I shared out my files and my teammate @abagofbread noticed my mistakes and solved the challenge by fixing my slightly incorrect text (2 letter case mistakes), properly xxdecoding it, and opening the gzip file that was contained.
Inside the gzip we found a python file with the key:
CTF{4BDF4498E4922B88642D4915C528DA8F}
The correctly transcribed text:
section 1 of 1 of file rfax_man
begin 644 rfax_man
h5sg60BSxwp62+57aMLVTPK3i9b-t+5pGLKyPA-FxxuysvFs+BT8+o0dVsM24
hcZHRaWYEHRBGFGtqk-cMV7oqqQRzbobGRB9Kwc-pTHzCDSSMJorR8d-pxdqd
hLWpvQWRv-N33mFwEicqz+UFkDYsbDvrfOC7tko5g1JrrSX0swhn64neLsohr
h26K1mSxnS+TF1Cta8GHHQ-t1Cfp7nh-oZeFuVi5MEynqyzX8kMtXcAynSLQx
hg4o56Pu4YUZHMqDGtczKeCwXU8PZEc4lY0FbDfFfgZpJFC-a-sHGLtGJgCMZ
hksr6XNTedEUdVJqxOO5VaReoH68eEPJ2m6d9mKhlhVE7zw4Yru4DUWRCJH28
hyeth+l2I0gPnEfrTLwAc+-TPS0YKYY3K0np58gVPgdAN8RY7+rQfRDin9JSa
hPG32WG7-rTl3uthvrnDO-wD09GDIRCniuoefs8UsfiWZOLq+0awOrQxAPM+C
hxLwOJ9VUKwdn7dJduLn1KhBucvL1pr5lGiBFfUbL79cFFex+G27kT+fsQ7X5
h87mgPivWhDSQHKPXqpKGniDkYsIYpg66ZWbHp4PfcgtPukElDWENlQPSuNAQ
hnboE4Bd8kyyokt67GgfGvBVS45sMFPtlgKRlG-QPFSgbMHujA3qYemxnuqGx
hp97aXpdKpvAE8zx-oUzazoVFz32X3OxAuiWJhKEjaYKpM7f95yv1S62v+k++
+
end
sum —r/size 7468/769 section (from "begin" to "end")
sum —r/size 36513/540 entire input file