avatar
Cyscom
Cybersecurity Student Community of VIT Chennai
  • CTF EVENTS
  • CATEGORIES
  • TAGS
  • ARCHIVES
  • POSTS
  • ABOUT
Home FinalTrace 2025 Forged Memory Log
Writeup
Cancel

Forged Memory Log

Forged Memory Log

  • Category: Cryptography
  • Author: P C Guhan

Description

Inside the Hourglass Citadel, Lyra uncovers a crystalline data shard said to contain the key to the final confession. But the key has been forged and obfuscated — mirrored fragments, deliberate noise, and counterfeit characters woven into its structure to mimic authenticity. Every attempt to read it only reveals more copies of itself, each slightly altered. To move forward, the player must isolate the genuine cipher sequence hidden beneath layers of forged keys and false reflections.

Solution

Brute force base-32 decode 39 times (I was limited to 39 as python had a memory error after 39 and I was lazy to do it in C/C++)

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
import base64
with open("output.txt", "r") as f:
    inp = f.read()
inp = inp.encode('ascii')
inp = inp[2:-1]

for i in range(39):
    inp = base64.b32decode(inp)
    print(i)

print(inp)

Flag: CYS{brute_forcing_is_the_way}

Flag

CYS{brute_forcing_is_the_way}
Edit on GitHub
Trending Tags
authentication idor sql-injection ssti xss

© 2025 Cyscom. Some rights reserved.

Using the Jekyll theme Chirpy.

A new version of content is available.