Bandit Walkthrough – Level 9

Level Description

http://www.overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit10.shtml

The purpose of this level is to teach you how to read and search through a file that is not “human readable”. The password for bandit10 is hidden in the file data.txt and is on a line that starts with a few = symbols.

Hint

There are a number of different ways to parse “unreadable” files. There is no wrong way to do this, it is just about being able to find the information you are looking for.

Solution	Select Show
As I said, there is no right or wrong way to go about this. The method below is simply what I have found provides the cleanest, clearest output. We start by using the strings command which is excellent at parsing these sorts of files. If we only run that, we are still presented with dozens of lines of text to sort through. Instead of trying to do that on our own, we can pipe this output to grep and search for a few = signs. This gives us the password very clearly. [$]-> ssh bandit9@bandit.labs.overthewire.org [$]-> UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR [$]-> strings data.txt \| grep == The password for bandit10 is: truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk

Solution

Show

As I said, there is no right or wrong way to go about this. The method below is simply what I have found provides the cleanest, clearest output. We start by using the strings command which is excellent at parsing these sorts of files. If we only run that, we are still presented with dozens of lines of text to sort through. Instead of trying to do that on our own, we can pipe this output to grep and search for a few = signs. This gives us the password very clearly.

[$]-> ssh bandit9@bandit.labs.overthewire.org 
[$]-> UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
[$]-> strings data.txt | grep ==

The password for bandit10 is: truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk

4 thoughts on “Bandit Walkthrough – Level 9”

Thanks for this blog and your time. I feel like your approach is very much in the spirit of OTW (i.e. you provide a ‘spoiler alert’).

I’ve been having a lot of fun working through the Bandit exercises, and have been doing my best not to ‘cheat’ before exhausting all resources. That said, as a noob, there are certain things that are above my skill level. I found your blog (after reading man pages, etc.) looking for hints at this level. Hints. Not solutions. Again, Kudos.

I do wonder about your solution, however, because the output seems ambiguous unless you are familiar with the form of the previous Bandit passwords.

There are several possible solutions in this output, but there doesn’t seem to be information about which one contains the character “=…=” at the start of a line (which, if I’m understanding, is what the exercise mandates) e.g. the password could also be “password” given the approach you’ve posted. Correct me if I’m missing something though. Thanks again for all your time — this blog is a great resource!

Josh says

October 7, 2016 at 1:49 pm

Thanks for the kind comments. I’ll be entirely honest and say it has been years since I actually worked through these, and remember very little about the specifics of them. So, sorry in advance for that. If I recall correctly, all of the passwords pretty much had the same format throughout. If multiple lines showed up when running the grep command, I assume there was only one that fit the “normal” format for the password.

EDIT: Scratch that. I just went ahead and ran through this level to check. The results you get when running the command I provide in the Spoilers section make it pretty clear. It returns 4 lines: “the6 | password | ism | “

Reply
- CTFS says
  
  February 27, 2018 at 8:44 am
  
  The question says the password is human unreadable but “password” in readable by human.
  
  Reply

I always check this blog after I find the answer to see other ways of solving the problem. The way I found it was:

tr -cd ‘\11\12\15\40-\176\’ < data.txt | grep ====

tr : translate command

-c: tells program to reverse SET1

-d: tells program to delete SET1 from SET2

'\11\12\15\40-\176': This is SET1, which I defined as tabs (\11), linefeed (\12), carriage returns (\15), and all keyboard characters (\40-\176). Remember the -c option reversed this and changes it to the opposite.

< data.txt : This is SET2, the given file

| grep ==== : pipes into grep telling it to return lines with ====

Youre right, it was a messy return, but I was able to pick out the answer. Your way was better, but at least I learned how to use the 'tr' command.

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Bandit Walkthrough – Level 9

Level Description

Hint

4 thoughts on “Bandit Walkthrough – Level 9”

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