Puzzle Pieces

Description

Author: Nordgaren

Well, I accidentally put the important data into a bunch of executables.

It was fine, until my cat stepped on my keyboard and renamed them all!

Can you help me recover the important data?

NOTE, the password for the archive is nahamcon-2025-ctf

Exploitation

After unzipping the downloaded file with the given password of nahamcon-2025-ctf:

7z e ctf_challenge_files.7z

We started gathering the metadata of the file. Turns out they are all windows PE32 executable as shown below: Then we look deeper into the metadata using exiftool We discovered the following line containing the order in which we compile the files in order to get the flags:

PDB File Name                   : xxxxxxxxxxx.pdb

So we did run the following command to filter the PDB File Name and the name of the file in order to get the order of execution:

> ls -l *.exe && exiftool * | grep 'PDB File Name'

Here is what the ouput looks like:

Having that order, we compiled the files one at the time in order to get the flag parts by parts. Here is the screenshot of the execution order:

This concatenated the flag parts and we got the flag:

Flag

flag{512faff5e7d89c9b8bd4b9517af9bfaa}