Hackvent 2019: Hidden 1

Challenge

HV19.H1 Hidden One

Sometimes, there are hidden flags. Got your first?

Born: January 22	     	 	   	   	 	       	     	  	  
Died: April 9   	  	 	    	  	      	   		  	  
Mother: Lady Anne   		 	   	   	      	  	      	  
Father: Sir Nicholas	 	      		    	    	  	  	      	      
Secrets: unknown

Solution

During the Day 6 challenge HV19.06 bacon and eggs, we notice there is a lot of suspicious whitespace (space and tab) characters after each line of statistics about Francis Bacon.

As the theme for this challenge was crypto, we Google search for white space cipher. One of the first few results links us to http://www.darkside.com.au/snow/ which details Whitespace steganography which can be used to conceal messages by appending whitespace to the end of lines! We download the 32-bit executable for this tool and run it as follows:

./SNOW.EXE -C input.txt

Where input.txt is simply the statistic panel text including all whitespace.

This spits out our flag!

Flag:

HV19{1stHiddenFound}