Capture The Flag!
Break through the 6 increasingly difficult challenges to capture "The Flag".
Using the Live CD
Configure a virtual machine to use the ISO image as a Live CD, using a virtualization software like VirtualBox, VMWare, qemu or similar.
- Get the latest ISO image (~26MB): https://github.com/janosgyerik/capture-the-flag/releases/download/v1.0/ctf1-r14.iso
- Create a new virtual machine: Linux, 2.6/3.x/4.x kernel, 32-bit
- Memory: 256MB
- Hard disk: no need for a disk
- CD: configure the CD drive to use the ISO image
- Start the Virtual Machine
In the boot menu, if you have a US keyboard, then simply press enter.
Otherwise, you can type fr, jp or hu and Enter
to use French, Japanese or Hungarian keymap, respectively.
The Live CD is based on TinyCore Linux, and all the regular boot options should work as expected.
After the system has started, you will see the instructions to pass the first challenge:
The goal is to advance through the levels one by one, discovering the password to the next level at each step, until you reach "The Flag" (and celebrate):
Solutions
The solutions are intentionally omitted from this project. You can find the solutions to the original Stripe challenges on the internet, but don't be surprised if they won't work on this Live CD out of the box. That's intentional too ;-)
Please keep your own solutions private. Thank you.
Installing additional software
You can install additional software in the running system, if you really want.
Switch to the tc user with the su - tc command, and
use the tce program -- TinyCore's package manager.
Simply run the program and follow the instructions.
Abusing the CD
If you want to get root access in the live system, you can
either do su - tc to become the admin user, or boot the
system with the mc superuser boot option.
This is no secret, and you won't learn anything this way.
Disclaimer
The challenges are based on the original online contest organized by Stripe: https://stripe.com/blog/capture-the-flag