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HACKvent 2015: Day 11

11 Dec 2015
CTF: Hackvent 2015
Link to challenge: http://hackvent.hacking-lab.com
Date Completed: 11 December 2015

Challenge

The following image is provided:

HV15 Day 11 Punch Card

Solution

I had to spend some time researching the above image but I soon discover that it is a punch card.
It turns out to be a IBM 96 Column Punchcard. Unfortunately there isn’t much information online on how to decode them.

A reverse image search comes up with the following image:
IBM 96 Punchcard

This is what the challenge organiser used to make the above challenge!
The first thing I do is open the image in Photoshop and apply a black background so I can see the data (black dots) more easily.

I get:
HV15 Punchcard Black Dots

Another important piece of information was this image I found online:
Zorch its a system 3

I used the above image to determine how I decoded the data. The above image encodes the data ZORCH IT’S A SYSTEM 3.

You have to look at each column in the punch card and generate a number.
For example, in the first column above we have _A__81 or in binary 011001.
This corresponds to the letter (more on this later).

Thus each block can have a total of 32 bit characters. The total card can therefore contain a total of 96 (32*3) characters.

Now, going back to our message, I first write out all the bits in one big block, I get:

At this stage all I need to figure out is the language, I don’t find much on this online but I eventually come up with a 64 length partially working language (it begins with a space):

So in the example I discussed, 011001 is Z because 011001 is 25 in decimal and Z is at index 25 in the string array above.

Note: This language was created using trial and error and so I didn’t determine many characters initially (which I have just left as a ? ). Later on I discovered an image (link) which allowed me to determine every character! (some special characters were still left as a ? )

At this stage I can write a nice short python script to read the data and convert it to the language.

I put the bit data into a file called input.txt and run my script.
The following message is printed out:

Great! The clue is quite simple, we simply need to alternate the case of each of the 6 blocks in the nugget (as separated with | ). We know the nugget begins with the uppercase  HV15 so we know the pattern straight away.

Flag:  HV15-m3hn-BG5H-lufe-8WPM-kzfk

 
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