picoCTF 2022 | Redaction gone wrong Write-up

Challenge description

Now you DON’T see me. This report has some critical data in it, some of which have been redacted correctly, while some were not. Can you find an important key that was not redacted properly?

Category: Forensics

Solution

The provided file is a .pdf, let’s take a look.

Some texts are blacked out

Even though they appear to be black bars, the texts underneath are still there. You simply have to copy and paste them out somewhere else to see them as normal:

And the flag is ours

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