picoCTF

Whitepages [250 pts]

Challenge Description

Challenge Description:

I stopped using YellowPages and moved onto WhitePages… but the page they gave me is all blank!
whitepages.txt

xxd whitepages.txt shows a sequence of repeated hex strings, 0xe28083 and 0x20
Printing the file in python shows that the file is composed of two characters, \u2003 (unicode 2003) and regular spaces (ascii 0x20).

f = open(‘whitepages.txt’, ‘r’)
print(f.read())

From here, have the intuition to guess that the file actually represents a binary string. Try both possibilities for which character represents 0 and which represents 1. Using \u2003 = 0 and 0x20 = 1, and decoding the binary string with this website using ASCII for the character encoding, the flag should be returned.

f = open('whitepages.txt', 'r')
text = f.read()

c1 = '\u2003'
c2 =  ' '
bin = ''

for c in text:
        if c == c1:
                bin += '0'
        elif c == c2:
                bin += '1'
        else:
                print("something went wrong")
print(bin)

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picoCTF{not_all_spaces_are_created_equal_3e2423081df9adab2a9d96afda4cfad6}