Mission 0x04

---

🔎 Solution

After SSH'ing in as emma, the next task was to retrieve mia's password - which the mission states is stored in a file literally named -:

emma@venus:~$ cat mission.txt 
################
# MISSION 0x04 #
################

## EN ##
User mia has left her password in the file -.

At first this looks trivial, but many Unix utilities (cat, less, more, etc.) treat a standalone - as a special token meaning "read from standard input" (stdin), not "the file named -". So running cat - will wait for you to type input rather than opening a file named -.

To tell the shell and the command that you really mean the filename -, prefix it with ./ (the current directory). That disambiguates it from the stdin token:

emma@venus:~$ cat ./-
iKXIYg0pyEH2Hos

With the recovered password I SSH'ed into mia:

ssh mia@venus.hackmyvm.eu -p 5000

Inside mia's account I read the flag file:

mia@venus:~$ cat flagz.txt 
8===FBMdY8hel2VMA3BaYJin===D~~

🚩Flag

8===FBMdY8hel2VMA3BaYJin===D~~