Challenge description

Can you open this safe? I forgot the key to my safe but this program is supposed to help me with retrieving the lost key. Can you help me unlock my safe? Put the password you recover into the picoCTF flag format like: picoCTF{password}

Category: Reverse Engineering

Solution

The challenge provided us with a program, let’s take a look at its source code:

After we input a password, it will be encoded in some way. Using my text editor VS Code, I can hover over encodeToString to see what it does

Seems like it will take the string and encode it to base64. Right below this is the code that will check our password:

So unless our base64-encoded password matches the encodedkey variable, we cannot get the flag. Luckily, we can just decode it into plaintext using tools like CyberChef