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Time machine writeup - Pico CTF ( General skills )

Description : What was I last working on? I remember writing a note to help me remember...

Solution -

Step 1: Download necessary files - First, we download the zip file provided in the challenge and extract its contents. Inside the extracted folder, there is a file named message.txt located in a "drop-in" directory. Opening this file, we find the following message: "This is what I was working on, but I'd need to look at my commit history to know why..."

This clue suggests that we need to explore the Git commit history to uncover more details

Step 2: Check the previous commit - Upon inspecting the directory structure, we notice that there is a hidden .git directory. This indicates that Git is initialized in the directory, and we can examine its commit history.

To proceed, we use the following command to see the list of previous commits: git log

Time machine pico ctf solution image
The git log command will show a history of the changes made in the repository, including the commit messages. One of the previous commits contains the flag we're searching for. Watching through the logs will eventually reveal the hidden flag embedded in one commit messages.

Flag is - picoCTF{t1m3m@ch1n3_e8c98b3a}