Crypto Stands For Cryptography

Challenge:

Welcome to the crypto team! We help consult in a variety of areas around the security department, helping to make sure our company is using proper encryption, data storage, and data transfer mechanisms.

The data security team said they currently use something called Base64 to "encrypt" data. They want to know if that's a secure way to store sensitive data, and provided a sample of data:

TWV0YUNURntiYXNlNjRfZW5jMGRpbmdfaXNfbjB0X3RoZV9zYW1lX2FzX2VuY3J5cHRpMG4hfQ==

Is it secure? Can you crack it?

Solution:

This is a pretty straightforward Base64 decoding and can be done on the command line using the base64 utility:

$ echo TWV0YUNURntiYXNlNjRfZW5jMGRpbmdfaXNfbjB0X3RoZV9zYW1lX2FzX2VuY3J5cHRpMG4hfQ== | base64 -d

MetaCTF{base64_enc0ding_is_n0t_the_same_as_encrypti0n!}