strings it

Challenge Description

Well, the description gave us a very useful clue. We’ll have to use strings for this challenge.

strings command

strings prints the strings of printable characters in files.

strings strings

After I downloaded the file (named “strings”) using wget, I ran file strings to check what type of file it is. It turns out that it is an executable file, which is why the description mentions “running it”.

Anyway, I proceeded by running strings strings to display the printable characters in this executable file. With my previous experiences with strings, an overwhelming block of text is always displayed in the terminal after running this command, burying the flag within it (if any). This time, I piped the output through grep with the search term being “pico” to get the flag, since the flag format for picoCTF challenges ispicoCTF{...}.

This allowed me to get the flag easily

Flag

picoCTF{5tRIng5_1T_d66c7bb7}