MemLabs Lab3 🛡️

## Challenge Description

A malicious script encrypted a very secret piece of information I had on my system. Can you recover the information for me please?

Note: This challenge is composed of only 1 flag and split into 2 parts.

Hint: You’ll need the first half of the flag to get the second.

You will need this additional tool to solve the challenge,

$ sudo apt install steghide

The flag format for this lab is: inctf{s0me_l33t_Str1ng}

Challenge file: MemLabs_Lab3

---

First we need to identify the operating system of the memory image.

$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw imageinfo

Next, let’s check the arguments given while running the programs through commandline

$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw --profile Win7SP1x86_23418 cmdline
Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.6.1
........
notepad.exe pid:   3736
Command line : "C:\Windows\system32\NOTEPAD.EXE" C:\Users\hello\Desktop\evilscript.py
************************************************************************
notepad.exe pid:   3432
Command line : "C:\Windows\system32\NOTEPAD.EXE" C:\Users\hello\Desktop\vip.txt

Interesting, we got two files. evilscript.py which as the name implies is evil and vip.txt which look like an important file.

Let’s search for these two files in memory.

$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw --profile Win7SP1x86_23418 filescan | egrep "evilscript.py|vip.txt"
Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.6.1
0x000000003de1b5f0      8      0 R--rw- \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Users\hello\Desktop\evilscript.py.py
.........
0x000000003e727e50      8      0 -W-rw- \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Users\hello\Desktop\vip.txt

Now that we have the offsets of the two files, let’s dump them.

$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw --profile Win7SP1x86_23418 dumpfiles -Q 0x000000003de1b5f0 -D lab3_output/
$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw --profile Win7SP1x86_23418 dumpfiles -Q 0x000000003de1b5f0 -D lab3_output

Here is the dumped python file:

import sys
import string

def xor(s):
	a = ''.join(chr(ord(i)^3) for i in s)
	return a

def encoder(x):
	return x.encode("base64")

if __name__ == "__main__":
	f = open("C:\\Users\\hello\\Desktop\\vip.txt", "w")
	arr = sys.argv[1]
	arr = encoder(xor(arr))
	f.write(arr)
	f.close()

This evil script is XORing the file vip.txt with a single character then Base64 encoding it.

And here is the content of the dumped text file:

am1gd2V4M20wXGs3b2U=

So we first need to Base64 decode it then XOR it again with same character to retrieve the original text.

$ python
>>> s = 'am1gd2V4M20wXGs3b2U='
>>> s = s.decode('base64')
>>> ''.join(chr(ord(i)^3) for i in s)
inctf{0n3_h4lf

First half: inctf{0n3_h4lf

Now that we have the first half of the flag, let’s hunt for the other half.

This one took me sometime, then I looked at the hint and it says something about steghide.

Steghide is a steganography program that is able to hide data in images and audio files and it supports JPEG and BMP images, so I decided to search memory for JPEG images.

$ volatility -f MemoryDump_Lab3.raw --profile Win7SP1x86_23418 filescan | grep ".jpeg"
Volatility Foundation Volatility Framework 2.6.1
0x0000000004f34148      2      0 RW---- \Device\HarddiskVolume2\Users\hello\Desktop\suspision1.jpeg

Would you look at that!!!, only one image and it looks suspicious :)

So let’s dump it.

It’s just a normal image, or is it ???

Here comes steghide, this image must have something hidden.

$ steghide extract -sf lab3_output/suspision1.jpeg 
Enter passphrase:

It’s asking for a passphrase, the hint clearly says that: You'll need the first half of the flag to get the second.

Let’s try the first half of the flag as the passphrase.

$ steghide extract -sf lab3_output/suspision1.jpeg 
Enter passphrase:
wrote extracted data to "secret text".

Voila!!! let’s get this secret text.

$ cat secret\ text 
_1s_n0t_3n0ugh}

Flag: inctf{0n3_h4lf_1s_n0t_3n0ugh