How NOT to solve the IEEE Day Badge Challenge
Recently, we were taking the IEEE Day Badge Challenge in https://ieee-collabratec.ieee.org/. We wanted to give another go on solving the clues, so instead of following the clues to open the encrypted and password-protected PDFs, we got the clue that the password is composed only of numeric digits and we used pdfcrack to open the files!
We installed pdfcrack using the following command:
1 | sudo apt-get install pdfcrack; |
$ sudo apt-get install pdfcrack [sudo] password for bob: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following NEW packages will be installed: pdfcrack 0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 28 not upgraded. Need to get 31,0 kB of archives. After this operation, 90,1 kB of additional disk space will be used. Get:1 http://cy.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 pdfcrack amd64 0.18-2 [31,0 kB] Fetched 31,0 kB in 1s (40,1 kB/s) Selecting previously unselected package pdfcrack. (Reading database ... 452721 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../pdfcrack_0.18-2_amd64.deb ... Unpacking pdfcrack (0.18-2) ... Setting up pdfcrack (0.18-2) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
To crack the files, we used the following commands that limited the input to the numeric digits and got the password back in seconds on a normal CPU:
1 | pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++3.pdf -c 0123456789; |
bob@Linux:~$ pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++3.pdf -c 0123456789 PDF version 1.7 Security Handler: Standard V: 2 R: 3 P: -1060 Length: 128 Encrypted Metadata: True FileID: 79c15a021438224ba4df58b0e7fa9a20 U: 4990feee0d63f411cf4eba3c1346ff2100000000000000000000000000000000 O: cc5e6a95577573cac6f6683d4c7f02d6605fe42e5622feb6dc36636263ba838e found user-password: '490000' bob@Linux:~$ pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++5.pdf -c 0123456789 PDF version 1.7 Security Handler: Standard V: 2 R: 3 P: -1060 Length: 128 Encrypted Metadata: True FileID: cf72bd9b3fb24145a6d2b578fa52c0e4 U: 8cd5ea45b59168ca10674bdd81f06f5800000000000000000000000000000000 O: 70301a6ff93ac7a91c28895180e8ad57a41388d2b7f3a813b83f4b3fd5274945 Average Speed: 49297.7 w/s. Current Word: '348478' found user-password: '1470000'
Information on the version we used is below:
$ apt info pdfcrack
Package: pdfcrack
Version: 0.18-2
Priority: optional
Section: universe/utils
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Original-Maintainer: Joao Eriberto Mota Filho <eriberto@debian.org>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 90,1 kB
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Suggests: pdf-viewer
Homepage: http://pdfcrack.sf.net
Download-Size: 31,0 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://cy.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
Description: PDF files password cracker
PDFCrack is a simple tool for recovering passwords from pdf-documents.
.
It should be able to handle all pdfs that uses the standard security handler
but the pdf-parsing routines are a bit of a quick hack so you might stumble
across some pdfs where the parser needs to be fixed to handle.
.
The main PDFCrack features are:
.
- Supports the standard security handler (revision 2, 3 and 4) on all known
PDF-versions.
- Supports cracking both owner and userpasswords.
- Both wordlists and bruteforcing the password are supported.
- Simple permutations (currently only trying first character as Upper Case).
- Save and load a running job.
- Simple benchmarking.
- Optimised search for owner-password when user-password is known.
.
This program can be used in forensics investigations or similar activities,
to legal password crack.
