3) Point-of-Sale Password Recovery

Difficulty: 1/5

Help Sugarplum Mary in the Courtyard find the supervisor password for the point-of-sale terminal. What's the password?

ANSWER: santapass

Download the binary

Download the binary from https://download.holidayhackchallenge.com/2020/santa-shop/santa-shop.exe

Extracting the secrets

The file can be extracted using 7z e sansta-shop.exe, that will extract the following files:

app-64.7z   nsExec.dll   nsis7z.dll   nsProcess.dll   SpiderBanner.dll   StdUtils.dll   System.dll  'Uninstall santa-shop.exe'   WinShell.dll

We extract the app-64.7z file with 7z e app-64.7z which will extract 74 files and 3 folders.

As many of the files are binary a simple grep doesn't get much useful but we can see that the Chormium LICENSES make cause a lot of false positives, so we make a search for strings on every file except the that searching for a password assignment in the code.

for f in $(find . -type f |grep -v LICEN); do cat $f |strings -n 20 |egrep -i "password ?= ?'" ;done
const SANTA_PASSWORD = 'santapass';
    this.password = '';
        ctx.password = '';
cat: ./Uninstall: No such file or directory
    this.password = '';
        ctx.password = '';

The constant SANTA_PASSWORD sets a hardcoded password santapass which is the challenge answer.