CanYouSee

• Description: How about some hide and seek?
• Difficulty: Easy

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🔎 Solution

Metadata in an image file contains supplementary information that describes various technical and contextual details about the image without altering its visual content.
To analyze the metadata of an image file, exiftool can be used. Upon inspecting the metadata, the Attribution URL field contains a value encoded in Base64.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/Desktop]
└─$ exiftool ukn_reality.jpg
ExifTool Version Number         : 13.00
File Name                       : ukn_reality.jpg
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 2.3 MB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2024:03:11 20:05:57-04:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2025:05:25 03:06:26-04:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2025:05:25 03:06:26-04:00
File Permissions                : -rw-r--r--
File Type                       : JPEG
File Type Extension             : jpg
MIME Type                       : image/jpeg
JFIF Version                    : 1.01
Resolution Unit                 : inches
X Resolution                    : 72
Y Resolution                    : 72
XMP Toolkit                     : Image::ExifTool 11.88
Attribution URL                 : cGljb0NURntNRTc0RDQ3QV9ISUREM05fZDhjMzgxZmR9Cg==
Image Width                     : 4308
Image Height                    : 2875
Encoding Process                : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample                 : 8
Color Components                : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling            : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
Image Size                      : 4308x2875
Megapixels                      : 12.4

Decoding this string reveals the flag.

┌──(kali㉿kali)-[~/Desktop]
└─$ echo "cGljb0NURntNRTc0RDQ3QV9ISUREM05fZDhjMzgxZmR9Cg==" | base64 -d
picoCTF{ME74D47A_HIDD3N_d8c381fd}

🚩Flag

picoCTF{ME74D47A_HIDD3N_d8c381fd}