[CRYPTO] Walzer

At least I learned that also Cyberchef has problems to solve this challenge :wink: If you are facing the same problem (output/download makes absolutely no sense) after you created your recipe manually, just copy/paste the whole cyberchef address in a new browser tab. This should solve it.

I did smt and I got a cipher but IDK how to crack it, anyone help ?

I agree with @sampriti and @will135 100%. If HTB actually solved this based on the clue “Walzer Style” without seeing the solution , rated it 40pts and published it, then they need their heads checked. There’s no way I would have published this puzzle with that clue. Even if I saw the solution without trying to work it out first I wouldn’t have green lit this. This is just throwing ■■■■ at the wall to see what sticks. There’s no fun or reward for that.

They need better vetting. At least try to solve these before rating and publishing. As said before this challenge was nothing but trying to guess what is in the author’s head.

Even the flag format was not normal. :smiley:

@IhsanSencan said:

Even the flag format was not normal. :smiley:

Yeah, it shows the the author didn’t really have a good plan, they just chose some algos and parameters and ran with it.

Anyway I got it, maybe its worst ever crypto challenge in htb.

If need help ? you can send pm.

Yeah, I don’t know man, but I share the same opinion as my friends @R4J @sampriti @xct . How this challenge got accepted is beyond me and I’m really pissed off at whoever tested this challenge. We shouldn’t be mad at the creator, he tried to teach us something. He made a mistake and owned it. But who the ■■■■ tested this ■■■■ and thought like “oh yea, this is fucking good, lets smash 40pts on top of it”. Well guess what. It’s fucking easy if it’s fucking solved with a guide. To all the testers, please at least try the challenges without guide. You guys aren’t perfect, we know that. But don’t ■■■■ us over like this.

PS: I have a cool crypto challenge for you guys. Guess the number from 1-1337. Send me a DM with your guess. First blood receives a star sticker that says “master at guessing”.

UPDATE: I’m getting a lot of messages of people asking for hints. Here you go: The number is between 1 and 1337.

UPDATE 2: I’m getting a lot of messages whether 1 and 1337 are included. No, they are not.

UPDATE 3: Here’s a hint. Reverse the following piece of code and you will get the flag.

import random
print("HTB{%i}" % random.randint(2, 1337))
while challenge.submitted:
    htb.release(challenge)

You may be right, you may be wrong. But you should really support your opinions more politely. That’s being said, I leave you all alone.

Spoiler Removed

Sorry, I guess :frowning:

Spoiler Removed

My bad. Never thought this could be tagged as spoiler.

What threw me off is that in Waltz you do a certain pattern and then repeat it kind of “backwards”, but that never happens here. You’re just doing the “equivalent” to the forward movement a few times. I honestly don’t think it’s a bad challenge, but there could have been more information provided on the steps involved, since at least one of them is found literally through guessing and/or bruteforce.

Spoiler Removed

Lol it was not a spoiler. It was other text encoded the same way.

THIS JUST WAS THE WOREST CHALLANGE EVER WITH THE WOREST FLAG FORMAT I SEEN

Type your comment> @sampriti said:

Maybe I will create a challenge that requires you to guess the number I thought of in my head between 1 and 1000 and call it information asymmetry. For fucks sake.

ITS 42 ISN’T IT - YOU KNOW I’M RIGHT - GIVE ME THE FLAG NAO

Snake did nothing wrong

is waltz related to music,dance or just completely random

@0xEA31 said:
As you may have noticed in the video, basic Walzer is a repeated sequence of three steps. The teacher calls them “step”, “side”, “close”.

Since easy cryptography is involved, you should map these steps with some kind of basic cypher algorithms.

Looking at the starting position, an educated eye should catch the first “step” immediately. What about the others? You choose, but choose wisely because, after three steps, you have to be in a different place, but in the same position.

And remember: you’re dancing, come on don’t be shy, let the music flow and continue. After all, the teacher says: “we can keep that going until the end of the song”. And we do know when the music stops, don’t we?

WaltzBeat

I hereby want to apologize to the author and the HTB staff for my rage. We shouldn’t have raged this hard about the challenge and expressed ourselves in a more polite way. After all this is just a mistake, and we all make mistakes. Let’s not discourage the author from making more challenges! I’m sure he got much more in store than this!

The challenge playtesters need to learn what “crypto” means. Apart from Optimus Prime, the last 4 crypto challenges released have all been dumb guessing games, and a poor reflection of how fascinating and educational good crypto CTF challenges can be.

Still have no idea, should I try rotation and combinations of all pieces of base64 codes?