Base64by32 (Huntress CTF 2024)

Author: @JohnHammond This is a dumb challenge. I’m sorry.

The title screams Base64 so I started by running the file with base64 -d. Another base64 file. Trying to run base32 -d gives an error since the text is encoded in Base64. ‘64by32’ reminds me of 2 by 4s, also written 2x4s. Ah! I wrote a little script to decode the file 32 times:

for i in {1..32}; do base64 -d "stage$i" > "stage$(($i + 1))"; done

The file stage33 (ah you thought stage32, but nope!) had the flag.