Prompt

Our analysts have obtained password dumps storing hacker passwords. After obtaining a few plaintext passwords, it appears that they are all encoded using different number bases.

Tutorial Video

Walk-Through

This challenge will give you experience recognizing and converting different number bases.

Questions

0x73636f7270696f6e

This text is encoded in hexadecimal. This text can be converted to ASCII by hand or by using an online tool such as RapidTables or CyberChef.

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Note: The 0x is used to indicate that the value is hexadecimal and should not be converted.

c2NyaWJibGU=

This text is encoded in base64. You can identify this by analyzing the range of characters used in the message and recognizing that it falls within the range for base64 (A-Z, a-z, 0-9, +, /, and =). This text can be converted to ASCII by hand or by using an online tool such as Base64Decode or CyberChef.

01110011 01100101 01100011 01110101 01110010 01100101 01101100 01111001

This text is encoded in binary. You can identify this by analyzing the range of characters used in the message and recognizing that it falls within the range for binary (0 and 1). This text can be converted to ASCII by hand or by using an online tool such as Binary Hex Converter or CyberChef.

01100010 01000111 00111001 01110011 01100010 01000111 01101100 01110111 01100010 00110011 01000001 00111101

This text is doubly encoded - first with base64 and then with binary. To revere the process, the message has to be converted from binary to ASCII, then base64 to ASCII. You can use the Binary Hex Converter followed by Base64Decode. It’s possible to combine these two steps using CyberChef.

Number Bases