Level 13
Compression all the way down.
The challenge instructions are as follows:
The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt, which is a hexdump of a file that has been repeatedly compressed. For this level it may be useful to create a directory under /tmp in which you can work. Use mkdir with a hard to guess directory name. Or better, use the command “mktemp -d”. Then copy the datafile using cp, and rename it using mv (read the manpages!)
Setup
First off, I wanted to ensure that I can work on this challenge without disturbing the original environment, so I chose to create a directory in the "tmp" root directory which is the temporary workspace, named it gr4y and copied the challenge over.
Recon
On opening the data.txt file we see the hexdump as follows:
The text in this file can be interpreted as follows:
00000000:
1f8b 0808 84c9 8768 0203 6461 7461 322e
.......h..data2.
Which it repeats for the entire file. For the purpose of this challenge we will use the xxd tool which is very helpful for working with file data. If I run xxd data.txt it will output the data.txt file as a hex dump!
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