CTF: MBR - FIXMBR

MBR Capture the Flag Challenge

Album released: 01 Sep 2016

https://masterbootrecord.bandcamp.com/album/c-fixmbr

Secret

010010000110010101100001011101100111100100100000010011010110010101110100011000010110110000100000011010010111001100100000011011100110111101110100001000000110010001100101011000010110010000101110000011010000101001001001011101000010000001110111011000010111001100100000011010100111010101110011011101000010000001101110011011110111010000100000011001010111011001100101011011100110110001111001001000000111001101111001011011100111010001101000011001010111001101101001011110100110010101100100

Analysis

Looks like binary. To start, we’ll make a few assumptions:

• It’s formatted as 8-bit bytes (octets)
• It’s big-endian

It’s safe to assume those and we can change them easily later if the data looks wonky.

After dividing the binary string to 8-bits, and parsing each of those octets as an integer, I get what looks like ASCII code points:

Solution

Heavy Metal is not dead. It was just not evenly synthesized