Fetch the Flag CTF 2022 writeup: Juggalo Central

A walkthrough of Snyk’s 2022 Fetch the Flag “Juggalo Central” challenge explains how a login page was compromised through PHP type juggling. Analysis of the supplied index.php file revealed that usernames were checked against a database and produced distinct error messages for nonexistent users versus existing users with incorrect passwords, allowing “admin” to be identified as valid. The password validation compared a stored value against the first 20 characters of an MD5 hash of the submitted username and password using PHP’s loose != operator. Because PHP can interpret strings such as “0” and “0e12345” as equivalent numeric values, the solver generated an MD5 hash beginning with “0e” followed by numeric characters, creating a so-called magic hash that bypassed the comparison. A Python brute-force script found suitable credentials, enabling access to the challenge site and its flag.

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