Hack The Box — The Secret of a Queen

Please only read this post if you’re seriously stuck and have exhausted all other options.

Challenge Type: Misc

Challenge name: The Secret of a Queen

Challenge Brief: Decrypt the code and find the Queen’s secret!

Difficulty: Easy/Intermediate (If you’ve done a similar challenge before, you may find it easier)

Introduction

Initially this was a tricky one for me. I’ve done similar challenges where I had to decrypt or extract data from images, but this one took me a little while to understand.

As with most challenges, Google is your best friend.

First steps

To begin, I had a quick look at the downloaded image:

It didn’t make any sense to me at this point, which is kind of the point, but I did notice some repetition which raised my interest, as shown in the image below:

Google Time

The next logical step was to deploy google.

I simply looked at the challenge brief and googled it word for word and got the following result:

As you can see, the top result points towards an online decoder (Link). Interestingly, the result also references ‘Mary Queen of Scots’. Could this be our Queen!?

I’d definitely recommend visiting that online decoder and having a read. It will give you a background as to what this cypher is, which may help you understand it better.

To see what else I can find, I also like to do an image search too. This turned out to be useful because I came across several interesting images with symbols and letters which seemed to match the symbols in the original cyphered image.

Most of the images contain the same information, however, one in particular caught my eye because I saw something familiar. Remember the repetition in the original image…

It turns out that I was onto something. I assumed the ‘Nulles’ meant NULL, or no value. A space in other words, which would make sense.

I wasn’t sure about dowbleth though… so I just googled it!

Apparently ‘dowbleth’ translates to ‘double’, and in the context of this cypher, it means that the next letter is a double letter.

Let’s Decrypt

There are a couple of ways you can decode the cypher, and both are manual.

Decrypt using the online decoder

I used this decoder. You just need to manually enter the symbols from the image and hit decrypt.

Result: HTB THEBABINGTONPLOT

Decrypt using old fashioned pen and paper

If you fancy being really old school, feel free to decrypt using a pen and paper. You should still return the same result, albeit slower.

Format the Flag

Before we submit the flag, we must format it.

Flag Format: HTB{THEBABINGTONPLOT}

Final Thoughts

If you’re interested, dig into the babington plot to see what it’s about. If not though, submit the flag and get yourself onto the next challenge!

Cheers — ML