Write-up: Game’s Meta

MILFS: Man I Love Fuckery Steg

Upon extraction, we get a single .jpg file

$ ls -la
-rw-rw-r-- 1 neowo neowo 24968 Sep 27 13:07 meta.jpg

“Meta” reminds us of metadata (at least it does for me). So, two options now:

Be smart and use exiftool

Exiftool is a command line tool that extracts all metadata from a file and displays it nicely for us:

$ exiftool meta.jpg 
ExifTool Version Number         : 12.40
File Name                       : meta.jpg
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 24 KiB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2024:09:27 13:07:22+01:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2024:10:10 19:02:56+01:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2024:09:27 15:25:10+01:00
File Permissions                : -rw-rw-r--
File Type                       : JPEG
File Type Extension             : jpg
MIME Type                       : image/jpeg
JFIF Version                    : 1.01
Resolution Unit                 : inches
X Resolution                    : 96
Y Resolution                    : 96
XMP Toolkit                     : Image::ExifTool 12.40
Description                     : Intake24{1Ru$h_B\!-N0-sT0p?}
Image Width                     : 680
Image Height                    : 281
Encoding Process                : Progressive DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample                 : 8
Color Components                : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling            : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
Image Size                      : 680x281
Megapixels                      : 0.191

Be a brute

Or we can simply use linux’s strings command to output all readable strings in a file:

$ strings meta.jpg | grep Intake
    <rdf:li xml:lang='x-default'>Intake24{1Ru$h_B\!-N0-sT0p?}</rdf:li>

Flagged! :D