To Be Xor Not to Be

Challenge:

.$)/3<'e-)<e':e&'<e<'e-)<5

Submit the flag as flag{here-is-the-answer}

Solution:

The challenge title is a pretty solid clue that the string is the result of an XOR operation. We created a simple script to see if the XOR was done with a single-byte key:

secret = ".$)/3<'e-)<e':e&'<e<'e-)<5"
for key in range(256):
    candi = ''.join([chr(ord(char) ^ key) for char in secret])
    if "flag" in candi:
        print(f"KEY:{key} = {candi}")

$ python3 solve.py

KEY:72 = flag{to-eat-or-not-to-eat}