MMA CTF 2015 - Nagoya Castle (100)

This challenge was a fun relaxing one, playing around in GIMP and eventually discovering a new tool which looks useful for future stego challenges.

The Image provided can be seen above. An upshot of a Beautiful Castle in Central Japan.

My first intuition was to go into GIMP and start playing around with threshold, color balance and curves.
Out of that I got a partial reveal of the Flag:

After taking a break and coming back, I decided to research what other people were doing to solve CTF stego challenges out there.
I stumbled upon Balda's Stegpy Release page -
http://www.balda.ch/posts/2013/Jun/04/release-stegpy/

Github link - https://github.com/Baldanos/Stegpy


After playing around with this tool (Which was very nice to use), I found the flag within seconds:

$ python stegpy.py -V castle.png

Defcon 23 :: OpenCTF 2015 - Enhance (50)

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:

Ju5tPr1nTheDAmNTh1n6