OSINT - The Lecture Code

A renowned computer science professor, known for his legendary lectures, once hinted at a hidden message buried within his online presence.

Over the years, students speculated about a secret key—a passphrase that unlocks an unknown treasure of knowledge.

Recently, a rumor saying that cryptic message surfaced in an obscure GitHub repository was heard, was it fake or really exists and reveals his secret after all? quack!

Solution :

Initially I started looking for github repositories that was related to Scientist Donald Knuth since the chall description said reveals his secret after all? quack! . Quack and Duck so, Donald Duck and therefore.. Donald Knuth… My bad. Lost Hopes ☹

…

Then I looked for the author on LinkedIn and other social platforms.

Found a post where Riya @riya_shah28 (author of this challenge) has commented a cipher text kind of word. Took a note of that.

Then I went to the official website of Cybercell VIIT and found a repo that belongs to this author.

Found only one repo and also got to know who was the scientist. DAVID MALAN 😊.

It was a forked repo. But a code was recently committed before 2 days to that forked repository.

crack2.py had this code in it

I just replaced the ciphertext we got from the LinkedIn comment and hurray we got the flag.

Flag: VishwaCTF{cs5o_qu4ck!}