Challenge Author: NANA AMA ATOMBO-SACKEY

Difficulty: Easy

Description

Know of little and big endian?

Process / Notes

1. netcat into the challenge
2. Need to find the little and big endian representations of a word
3. Looks like there’s a source file as well - wget that
4. It looks like the program will produce a 5 character word and we’ll have to guess the little endian, and the big endian representations of that word in order to receive the flag
5. I know I’ve read about endianness before but I can’t remember what it is. Something to do with the order of significant bytes?
6. Hint 1 tells use to find the ASCII hex representations of each character first. I’m guessing I’ll need to convert the word to hex, then enter the hex of that word in some specific order
7. Got my word - echo 'word' | hd
8. Going to try entering it backwards first for little endian?
9. When I entered more than the expected 5 characters, it told me I was wrong twice, so it’s only expecting the 5 hex characters in the buffer (I think the new line hex getting inserted made the answer wrong)
10. Backwards was correct for little endian!
11. Forwards was the right answer for big endian. We’ve got the flag

15 minutes 48 seconds to complete

Hints

1. You might want to check the ASCII table to first find the hexadecimal representation of characters before finding the endianness.

Core Lessons

1. Understanding how to convert text to hex with the terminal
2. Understanding little endian and big endian