Commitment Issues

Published: April 3, 2024Updated: December 9, 2025

Description

I accidentally wrote the flag down. Good thing I deleted it!

Download the challenge zip, unzip it locally, then change into the drop-in directory.

wget https://artifacts.picoctf.net/c_titan/77/challenge.zip && \ unzip challenge.zip && \ cd drop-in/

Solution

This is a successor to the Time Machine challenge. If you use `ls -a` in drop-in directory you can see the .git file which allows you to see the commits. Before looking at prior commits in the log there is a file called "message.txt" with the file contents of "TOP SECRET".
  1. Step 1List commits
    git log shows a commit labeled "create flag" with ID 3d5ec8a26ee7b092a1760fea18f384c35e435139.
    git log
  2. Step 2Check out the flag commit
    Switch to that commit with checkout functionality and cat message.txt to see the flag.
    git checkout 3d5ec8a26ee7b092a1760fea18f384c35e435139 && \ cat message.txt

Flag

picoCTF{s@n1t1z3_30e86...}