Barmixing-Bot

Description

Author: freddy

Category: Misc

There’s a fun and quirky IRC bot to play with. It responds to commands in private chat but also in #hacklu-saloon on freenode. We think it’s involved in a devious scheme that distracts people to get their money pickpocketed. So be careful!

Solution

Author: Sam Thomas / xorpse

By starting a query with the bot and issuing a !help command, we get some information on how the bot functions:

-!- Irssi: Starting query in FreeNode with barmixing-bot
<xorpse> !help
<barmixing-bot> Send messages to the bot or the channel starting with an
exclamation mark. Known commands are list, status, karma, math, base64,
base64d, rot13, ping, hack, request, list

Sending !status gives us a list of channels in which the bot resides; this includes a channel called #hacklu-secret-channel:

My name is barmixing-bot, my uptime is 12 hours 35 minutes and 42 seconds. I
am on the following channels: #hacklu-saloon, #hacklu-secret-channel, ...

The intuition is that the flag might be accessible by joining #hacklu-secret-channel (since it’s not possible to join it without an invite).

After testing some of the commands, we see that !base64d will cause the bot to echo whatever it decodes verbatim. The IRC command for inviting someone to a channel is:

invite <name> <channel>

Using the bot we encode the command (note: this will be echoed as a PRIVMSG by the bot rather than an INVITE command):

<xorpse> !base64 invite xorpse #hacklu-secret-channel
<barmixing-bot> aW52aXRlIHhvcnBzZSAjaGFja2x1LXNlY3JldC1jaGFubmVs

And then have it decode the command:

<xorpse> !base64d aW52aXRlIHhvcnBzZSAjaGFja2x1LXNlY3JldC1jaGFubmVs
-!- barmixing-bot invites you to #hacklu-secret-channel
<barmixing-bot> invite xorpse #hacklu-secret-channel

It seems the bot must scan what it decodes for an invite command and then act accordingly.

The topic in #hacklu-secret-channel is the flag:

FLAG: GfeBNmN5XjwDvQB64qoqaEEeYogk4rGH3ikZ0qtc3B3HKLDoAH