Permissions

Author: Geoffrey Njogu | 100 points

Description

Can you read files in the root file?

The system admin has provisioned an account for you on the main server:

ssh -p ***** [e-mail]

Password: ********

Can you login and read the root file?

Solution

Once we log into the server using ssh and the password given to us, we are dropped into an empty home directory of the picoplayer user.

After we take a look around and don't find anything, we can move to the / directory using cd and use ls to view the contents of the root directory.

picoplayer@challenge:~$ ls
picoplayer@challenge:~$ cd /
picoplayer@challenge:/$ ls
bin   challenge  etc   lib    lib64   media  opt   root  sbin  sys  usr
boot  dev        home  lib32  libx32  mnt    proc  run   srv   tmp  var
picoplayer@challenge:/$ 

We can see the usual tmp, var, usr and other normal directories in Linux. However, there is an uncommon "challenge" directory. Once we cd into it and view the contents of the directory, we can see a file called "metadata.json". Once we cat the file we get the flag.

picoplayer@challenge:/$ cd challenge/
picoplayer@challenge:/challenge$ ls
metadata.json
picoplayer@challenge:/challenge$ cat metadata.json 
{"flag": "picoCTF{uS1ng_v1m_3dit0r_021d10ab}", "username": "picoplayer", "password": "******"}picoplayer@challenge:/challenge$ 

Flag

We can see the flag in the file picoCTF{uS1ng_v1m_3dit0r_021d10ab}