#kksctf open 2019 — Xmas Tree

Ron Stoner
2 min readDec 29, 2019

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The Challenge

Do you like to decorate the Christmas tree?

This challenge was listed as “Misc”, and no other hints were provided.

The Solution

This was an easy challenge, as the answer was literally staring participants in the face during the entire CTF. Navigating to the kksctf web page showed a variety of Christmas themes, including a neat ASCII Christmas tree.

ASCII Art!

The above tree ASCII art shows a few different pieces of text in different colors. If we look in the HTML source, we can see the <span> tags which indicate a color change for certain pieces of text.

It looks sweet in HTML too!

Combining the 7 pieces of colored text results in the final flag of kks{n3w_y34r_m@dn3$$}. Happy New Year!

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