Welcome to another post on our series of OverTheWire Bandit! This post covers my walkthrough of levels 6-10. If you would like to jump to specific level then each level with be accompanied with the username and password. I will be appending consecutive levels as I have to time to post. Enjoy!
Bandit 6
http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit6.html
The password for the next level is stored in a file somewhere under the inhere directory and has all of the following properties:
human-readable 1033 bytes in size not executable
To start lets cd into the inhere folder and run ls to see the files and folders.
bandit5@bandit:~$ ls
inhere
bandit5@bandit:~$ cd inhere/
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ ls
maybehere00 maybehere03 maybehere06 maybehere09 maybehere12 maybehere15 maybehere18
maybehere01 maybehere04 maybehere07 maybehere10 maybehere13 maybehere16 maybehere19
maybehere02 maybehere05 maybehere08 maybehere11 maybehere14 maybehere17
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ cd maybehere00
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere/maybehere00$ ls -la
total 72
drwxr-x--- 2 root bandit5 4096 May 7 2020 .
drwxr-x--- 22 root bandit5 4096 May 7 2020 ..
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 1039 May 7 2020 -file1
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 551 May 7 2020 .file1
-rw-r----- 1 root bandit5 9388 May 7 2020 -file2
-rw-r----- 1 root bandit5 7836 May 7 2020 .file2
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 7378 May 7 2020 -file3
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 4802 May 7 2020 .file3
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 6118 May 7 2020 spaces file1
-rw-r----- 1 root bandit5 6850 May 7 2020 spaces file2
-rwxr-x--- 1 root bandit5 1915 May 7 2020 spaces file3
Okay so what we have here is a bunch of folders nested inside other folder as well as a couple of files.
As stated we have to find a file that is human-readable, 1033 bytes in size, and not executable.
We can use the find command for this. So once again we always RTFM aka read the f**ing manual. We need to look for ways of filtering out the properties of the file. I found -size, -type, and -executable options.
-size n[cwbkMG]
File uses n units of space, rounding up. The following suffixes can be used:
`b' for 512-byte blocks (this is the default if no suffix is used)
`c' for bytes
`w' for two-byte words
`k' for Kilobytes (units of 1024 bytes)
`M' for Megabytes (units of 1048576 bytes)
`G' for Gigabytes (units of 1073741824 bytes)
The size does not count indirect blocks, but it does count blocks in sparse files that
are not actually allocated. Bear in mind that the `%k' and `%b' format specifiers of
-printf handle sparse files differently. The `b' suffix always denotes 512-byte
blocks and never 1 Kilobyte blocks, which is different to the behaviour of -ls.
The + and - prefixes signify greater than and less than, as usual. Bear in mind that
the size is rounded up to the next unit. Therefore -size -1M is not equivalent to
-size -1048576c. The former only matches empty files, the latter matches files from 1
to 1,048,575 bytes.
-type c
File is of type c:
b block (buffered) special
c character (unbuffered) special
d directory
p named pipe (FIFO)
f regular file
l symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in
effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic
links when -L is in effect, use -xtype.
s socket
D door (Solaris)
To search for more than one type at once, you can supply the combined list of type
letters separated by a comma `,' (GNU extension).
-executable
Matches files which are executable and directories which are searchable (in a file
name resolution sense). This takes into account access control lists and other per‐
missions artefacts which the -perm test ignores. This test makes use of the access(2)
system call, and so can be fooled by NFS servers which do UID mapping (or root-squash‐
ing), since many systems implement access(2) in the client's kernel and so cannot make
use of the UID mapping information held on the server. Because this test is based
only on the result of the access(2) system call, there is no guarantee that a file for
which this test succeeds can actually be executed.
If couple these parameters together this should give us what we’re looking for.
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ find -type f -size 1033c ! -executable
./maybehere07/.file2
bandit5@bandit:~/inhere$ cat ./maybehere07/.file2
DXjZPULLxYr17uwoI01bNLQbtFemEgo7
Yep there’s our password for the next level!
Username: bandit6 Password: DXjZPULLxYr17uwoI01bNLQbtFemEgo7
Bandit 7
http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit7.html
The password for the next level is stored somewhere on the server and has all of the following properties:
owned by user bandit7 owned by group bandit6 33 bytes in size
Just like the previous level I used the find command below from root folder / to find a file owned by user bandit7, owned by group bandit6 and 33 bytes of size.
bandit6@bandit:~$ find / -user bandit7 -group bandit6 -size 33c 2>/dev/null
/var/lib/dpkg/info/bandit7.password
What does each parameter mean?
-userthe owner of the file.-groupthe group owner of the file.-sizethe size of the file.2>/dev/nullredirects error messages to null so that they do not show on stdout.
So we cat that file:
bandit6@bandit:~$ cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/bandit7.password
HKBPTKQnIay4Fw76bEy8PVxKEDQRKTzs
Username: bandit7 Password: HKBPTKQnIay4Fw76bEy8PVxKEDQRKTzs
Bandit 8
http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit8.html
The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt next to the word millionth
This one is fairly easy. All we have to do cat data.txt and then just pipe it | to grep
bandit7@bandit:~$ ls
data.txt
bandit7@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | grep millionth
millionth cvX2JJa4CFALtqS87jk27qwqGhBM9plV
Think of grep as the search or find feature in any text editor you’ve used before except much more powerful!
Username: bandit8 Password: cvX2JJa4CFALtqS87jk27qwqGhBM9plV
Bandit 9
http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit9.html
The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt and is the only line of text that occurs only once
More piping! Here you might need to reference the man pages on two tools uniq and sort
First let’s sort the strings, get the count of how many times they appear in data.txt and sort them again, so the string with appearance of 1 is on top.
bandit8@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort
1 UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
10 07KC3ukwX7kswl8Le9ebb3H3sOoNTsR2
10 0efnqHY1ZTNRu4LsDX4D73DsxIQq7RuJ
10 0N65ZPpNGkUJePzFxctCRZRXVrCbUGfm
10 0Xo6DLyK5izRqEtBA7sW2SRmlAixWYSg
By the way -c tells us how many time the values on adjacent lines have occurred
Another way is to pipe it one more time to grep with -v 10 which will invert the match inturn only revealing the string we want, but you already figured out how many times other strings appear by that point ;)
bandit8@bandit:~$ cat data.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort | grep -v 10
1 UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
A much cleaner and quicker solution would be to use the command below:
sort data.txt | uniq -u
Also important to note is if you don’t sort the lines first, uniq has trouble matching unique values unless the lines are adjacent and doesn’t care if the string will show again later.
Username: bandit9 Password: UsvVyFSfZZWbi6wgC7dAFyFuR6jQQUhR
Bandit 10
http://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/bandit10.html
The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt in one of the few human-readable strings, preceded by several ‘=’ characters.
According to the hint, the file contains both strings and binary data which can make it difficult to read. So we use to the strings command to sort out plain text from the binary garble and once again pipe it to grep to output only the lines preceded by several equal signs =
bandit9@bandit:~$ strings data.txt | grep ====
========== the*2i"4
========== password
Z)========== is
&========== truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk
Username: bandit10 Password: truKLdjsbJ5g7yyJ2X2R0o3a5HQJFuLk