OpenCTF was a great time at Defcon23 this year. One of the first challenges I attempted was this one called "Enhance".
By the name I almost immediately associated it with all those bad hacker moments in Movies & TV Shows where they shout out "Enhance! Zoom In! Sharper!"
I learned later this was a reference to the Super Troopers scene, you can find a snippet of this great moment here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN42ntgmdw
For this challenge we were given a high resolution jpeg image. Here's a smaller version of the original image:
I had originally opened this in 'feh' which is a great application you can get on linux. When opening in feh, it was automatically zoomed to 100%. This helped a lot when solving the challenge. After looking around I started to think where someone would hide data, it would probable be in the reflection! I remember hearing something about a CSI episode where they found evidence based on the reflection of an eye or watch or something similar. So that's where I looked first. After looking at the eyes, I found a QR code hidden in the reflection.
After flipping the orientation and taking my phone out for the QR code, I got nothing. Looks like the QR code needed to be "Enhanced"
Going into GIMP, I boosted the levels a bit and took another shot and BOOM, there was the flag! :)
Also when scaling it back up, make sure no Interpolation is set so that it stays crisp.
Another Note: QRDroid ended up doing the trick on the messy QR Code
Flag:
By the name I almost immediately associated it with all those bad hacker moments in Movies & TV Shows where they shout out "Enhance! Zoom In! Sharper!"
I learned later this was a reference to the Super Troopers scene, you can find a snippet of this great moment here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KN42ntgmdw
For this challenge we were given a high resolution jpeg image. Here's a smaller version of the original image:
I had originally opened this in 'feh' which is a great application you can get on linux. When opening in feh, it was automatically zoomed to 100%. This helped a lot when solving the challenge. After looking around I started to think where someone would hide data, it would probable be in the reflection! I remember hearing something about a CSI episode where they found evidence based on the reflection of an eye or watch or something similar. So that's where I looked first. After looking at the eyes, I found a QR code hidden in the reflection.
After flipping the orientation and taking my phone out for the QR code, I got nothing. Looks like the QR code needed to be "Enhanced"
Going into GIMP, I boosted the levels a bit and took another shot and BOOM, there was the flag! :)
Also when scaling it back up, make sure no Interpolation is set so that it stays crisp.
Another Note: QRDroid ended up doing the trick on the messy QR Code
Flag:
Ju5tPr1nTheDAmNTh1n6
