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THE DOMINO EFFECT

Reverse cascading 3-byte neighbor XOR sequence using known flag prefix 'hwj{'.

Tools Used

PythonXOR Analysis

Overview

Ciphertext formula C[i] = P[i-1] ^ P[i] ^ P[i+1] is reversed starting from known flag prefix hwj{.

Reconnaissance

Knowing first four bytes hwj{ allows linear recurrence solve.

Exploitation Strategy

Solve sequentially: P[i+1] = C[i] ^ P[i] ^ P[i-1].

Solution Code

cipher = bytes.fromhex(open("telemetry.out").read().strip())
plain = bytearray(b"hwj{")
for i in range(3, len(cipher)-1):
    plain.append(cipher[i] ^ plain[i] ^ plain[i-1])
print(plain.decode())

Flag

hwj{c4sc4d1ng_x0r_1s_3l3g4nt!}