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Home Ciphercase 2026 Blue Sky Telemetry
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Blue Sky Telemetry

Blue Sky Telemetry

Author: Prateet Gogia

This is a Steganography and Reverse Engineering-based CTF challenge demonstrating layered hidden data, red herrings, and custom firmware encryption.

Firstly for the Decoy part:

Running strings artifact.jpg yields a fake Base64 string decoding to CTF{y0u_g0dd4mn_r1ght_I_h1d_1t_but_n0t_h3r3}.

For the Steganography part:

First, we check the metadata. exiftool artifact.jpg reveals Artist : c3VwZXJzZWNyZXRrZXk=, which Base64 decodes to supersecretkey.

Next, we use this for the Archive Extraction. Running steghide extract -sf artifact.jpg -p supersecretkey drops payload.zip.

For the Reverse Engineering part:

Unzipping reveals intercept_log.txt (containing a Base32 decoy and a raw hex array) and firmware_snippet.c.

The C script shows the data was encrypted using (data[i] ^ 0x33) + 0x05.

To get the final flag, the player must write a script to reverse this operation chr((byte - 0x05) ^ 0x33) against the hex array to yield the final flag: CTF{h3is3nb3rg_c00k_t3l3m3try_99_1}.

Flag

CTF{h3is3nb3rg_c00k_t3l3m3try_99_1}
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