Terminal Quests

Goals

After completing this lab, you should be able to use the command line to:

• Navigate between directories and list their contents
• Examine both text and binary files
• Decode/Decrypt different types of data encoding
• Extract information from a JSON file
• Commit your changes to a Git version control repository

Instructions

This lab takes the form of four "quests", each of which will require you to do a bit of work on the course server (via the command line. After each step, you will need to commit your work. Some quests will net you a password that will be required to start the next one.

Have fun!

Getting started and looking around

Each quest has its own short writeup -- you can find the writeups underneath the "quests" directory --- each numbered subdirectory contains a "README.md" file which you can view by typing bat README.md (remember to type q to exit the bat viewer).

Some of the quests will reference one or more data files, which you can find in the "data" directory. Your answers for the quests will all go into files found in the "answers" directory. After adding your answer to a given file, you should commit your work with the command:

git commit -am "Quest N: <what you did>"

Quest summary

1. Identity card — Edit a file with your name and ID. Commit.
2. Hidden password — Use strings on a binary to spot a single-line "base64" token (there are decoys!). Decode; save the password. Commit.
3. Decryption — Use GPG with the quest 2 password to decrypt row,col coordinates. Use those to pick characters from data/romeo.txt, which spell the next password. Commit.
4. JSON scavenger — Use the quest 3 password as the key to filter JSON objects in data/quotes.jsonl; concatenate their text to read a famous quote. Find the author and save their name. Commit.

Verifying your work

At any point you can review all the commits and corresponding changes you made to your version control repository with the following command:

git log -p