In a previous article I mentioned that everyone should rent a VPS for selfhosting an ecetera of things, but if you dont know the command line what can you do?

Overthewire.org⌗

The bandit wargame on this website , is a fun an interactive way to learn basic shell commands in the form of a interactive puzzels.

The basic premise of this, each level is a user in a linux server. In order to move onto the next level you must find the password for the user. You find the password by

🚨🚨🚨 SPOILERS 🚨🚨🚨⌗

Im going to write down how I solved each level. If you haven’t atleast tried it go try it before reading this.

lvl0 -> lvl1⌗

The first level is to ssh into server on specified port and user

ssh <user>@<IP or DOMAIN NAME> -p <PORT>

You are prompted for the password, the password is the same as username.

The first level is easy enough, its in the ‘readme’ file in user’s home directory. I use cat to output file because its the easiest to copy and paste password for the next level.

lvl1 -> lvl2⌗

Now you repeat the same proccess from the first level but for user bandit1. I figured it be quicker to just change user with su <user> but for whatever reason it does not work.

On this level you must open a file named ‘-’, this causes issues because how does a cli know how to differentiate between a file named ‘-’ or if its a command line flag?

I know of one solution, you could refer to the file by its full path name.

cat ./-

This reminded me of this story in The Unix Haters Manual, there is this case were if you named a file ‘-rf’ it would take it as a argument and delete everthing in the directory.

lvl2 -> lvl3⌗

This challenge is to open a file with spaces in its name.

You can address a file with spaces in its name by escaping the space character with
or enclosing the name with quotes

cat name\ of\ file
#or
cat "name of file"

lvl3 -> lvl4⌗

The challenge is listing hidden files.

In UNIX file system, every directory has to default directories the

  • ‘.’ current directory
  • ‘..’ its parent directory

To make ls more terse (i think it was brian kernighan) the developer decided to ignore file the first character was a ‘.’ so that these default directories were ignored.

# psuedocode example
for name in current_dir:
    if name[0] == '.':
        continue
    else:
        print(name)

The -a flag is used to show all files

ls -a inhere/
cat inhere/<name of file>

lvl4 -> lvl5⌗

This is sort of a recap of the lvl0 -> lvl1 but they are multiple files (file00 .. file09).

Im sure this is the most naive way of doing it but they are only 10 files so its not a big deal.

cat ./-file00
# incase its not the file use up arrow to quickly rewrite command

The files seem to have special characters that mess with the terminal, the reset command resets everything back to what they were like.

lvl5 -> lvl6⌗

This time were are tasked to find a file that is

  • human-readable
  • 1033 bytes in size
  • not executable

This seems like a trivial because ls -lh would list out file permissions ‘-rwxr—’ and file sizes but they are 20 folders each with 6 files. Doing this by hand wont do anymore.

Actually I forgot that there could be hidden files so they are actually 9 files per folder.

So how do we go about finding the password?