Careless Talk plaintext flag in decoy noise

rev
flag SkillBit{c4r3l355_t4lk_c05t5_l1v35}

Overview

A 64-bit Linux ELF that prompts for a "watchword." The flavor text hints that the human clerks kept their secret fine — it's the terminal itself that talked.

Solution

No need to touch the password check or even run the binary. strings alone gives it away, sitting among dozens of decoy lines (convoy rosters, harbor ciphers, relay digests) meant to bury the real one in noise:

session 
$strings watchword | grep -E 'FLAG|}'
FLAG_A=SkillBit{c4r3l355_t4lk_
FLAG_B=c05t5_l1v35}

Two environment-style strings, split down the middle, sitting in plaintext in the data section. Concatenating them gives the flag directly.

Pitfall

Padding a binary with decoy strings only raises the noise floor for eyeballing strings output top to bottom — it does nothing against a grep for the part of the format you already know, like a trailing }.

Flag

text 
SkillBit{c4r3l355_t4lk_c05t5_l1v35}