picoCTF Solutions
picoCTF 2026ForensicsEasy

Binary Digits

Published: March 20, 2026

Description

This file doesn't look like much... just a bunch of 1s and 0s. But maybe it's not just random noise. Can you recover anything meaningful from this?

Setup

Download digits.bin

Download the file and inspect its contents.

The file contains ASCII '1' and '0' characters -- interpret them as binary data.

cat digits.bin | head -c 100

Solution

  1. Step 1Inspect the file
    Open digits.bin and confirm it contains a sequence of '1' and '0' ASCII characters representing binary data.
    cat digits.bin
  2. Step 2Convert binary to text
    Split the binary string into 8-bit chunks and convert each byte to its ASCII character. Python makes this straightforward.
    python3 -c " data = open('digits.bin').read().strip().replace('\n','').replace(' ','') flag = ''.join(chr(int(data[i:i+8],2)) for i in range(0,len(data),8)) print(flag) "

Flag

picoCTF{...}

The flag is encoded as a plain binary string -- convert each 8-bit group to ASCII.