Hackertool was one of the Baby's First challenges in DEF CON CTF Quals this year, and provided you with a .torrent file, and asked you to download the file and MD5 it. Seems easy enough, so I knew there must be more to it. The torrent file itself was a whopping 4 MB in size, very large for a torrent file. Looking at it, we see it contains just one file, named every_ip_address.txt, and the file is ~61GB in size. Hrrm, there must be an easier way than torrenting 61GB, especially at <1k/s.

So what is this every_ip_address.txt? Seems like it might be a list of all IP addresses. In fact, if you add up the length of all IP addresses written in decimal dotted-quad form, separated by newlines, you get 61337501696 bytes, exactly the same as the length of our target torrent. But is it newline separated? What order are they in? Fortunately, torrents also contain the SHA-1 of each 256kb block of the file. So I wrote a little python script to quickly check if we had a match for the first block:

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import hashlib

def get_block():    
  block = 256 * 1024
  v = ''
  for a in xrange(0, 256):
    for b in xrange(0, 256):
      for c in xrange(0, 256):
        for d in xrange(0, 256):
          v += '%d.%d.%d.%d\n' % (a,b,c,d)
          if len(v) > block:
            return v[:block]       


print hashlib.sha1(get_block()).hexdigest()

This matched the value from the torrent file, so I knew we were on the right track. Unfortunately, python is too slow to hash 61GB this way, so I turned to C for the final solution:

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#include <openssl/md5.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char **argv){
  char buf[64];
  MD5_CTX md5_ctx;
  int i,j,k,l;

  MD5_Init(&md5_ctx);
  for (i=0;i<256;i++) {
    printf("%d.\n", i);
    for (j=0;j<256;j++) {
      for (k=0;k<256;k++) {
        for (l=0;l<256;l++) {
          sprintf(buf, "%d.%d.%d.%d\n", i, j, k, l);
          MD5_Update(&md5_ctx, buf, strlen(buf));
        }
      }
    }
  }
  MD5_Final(buf, &md5_ctx);
  for (i=0;i<128/8;i++) {
    printf("%02ux", buf[i] & 0xFF);
  }
  printf("\n");
  return 0;
}

There might’ve been prettier ways, but this ran in the background while I moved on to another hash, and got us our first flag not too long afterwards.