Firtog gives us a pcap file that you can quickly see features several TCP sessions containing the git server protocol. The binary protocol looks like this in the follow TCP stream mode:

firtog wireshark

Switching Wireshark to decode this as “Git” almost works, but there’s a trick. If we read the git pack protocol documentation, we’ll see there’s a special side-band mode here, where the length field is followed with a ‘1’, ‘2’, or ‘3’ byte indicating the type of data to follow. We only want the data from sideband ‘1’, which is the actual packfile data. So we’ll grab that data using Wireshark and write it to a file, fixing up the last byte with quick python work.

Once we have the packfiles, we recreate the git repository. Begin by creating an empty git repository with git init. Then, we can use git unpack-objects < PACKFILE on each of the packfiles (in order, or else we won’t get the deltas resolved properly). Finally, to get the structure back to normal, run git fsck and you’ll see something like this:

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% git fsck
Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done.
Checking objects: 100% (21/21), done.
dangling commit 922faaf7d9a6f74eb661acc62b93b968ec3f781f

This dangling commit tells us it’s the only unreferenced commit in the repository (i.e., not referenced as a parent by a commit or merge), so let’s check that one out:

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% git checkout 922fa
HEAD is now at 922faaf... a new encrypted flag :P:P

Ok, so now we’re somewhere. Let’s see what we have:

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% ls
flag.py  flag.txt  readme
% cat flag.py
#!/usr/bin/python
# Simple but secure flag generator for ASIS CTF Quals 2016

from os import urandom
from hashlib import sha1

l = 128
rd = urandom(l)
h = sha1(rd).hexdigest()
flag = 'ASIS{' + h + '}'
print flag
f = open('flag.txt', 'w')
flag_enc = ''
for c in flag:
  flag_enc += hex(pow(ord(c), 65537, 143))[2:]
f.write(flag_enc)
f.close()
% cat flag.txt
41608a606a63201245f1020d205f1612147463d85d125c1416635c854c74d172010105c14f8555d125c3c

So they grabbed some random data and hashed it, then did some exponentiation byte-by-byte to produce the output. There’s probably some better way to reverse it, but since it’s a limited character set, I just created a map of values to reverse the flag by performing the same math they did.

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% cat flagdec.py 
flag = '41608a606a63201245f1020d205f1612147463d85d125c1416635c854c74d172010105c14f8555d125c3c'

lookup = {}

for b in 'ASIS{}0123456789abcdef':
    lookup[hex(pow(ord(b), 65537, 143))[2:]] = b

i = 0
out = ''
while i < len(flag):
    try:
        out += lookup[flag[i]]
    except KeyError:
        out += lookup[flag[i] + flag[i+1]]
        i += 1
    i += 1

print out
% python flagdec.py 
ASIS{c691a0646e79f3c4d495f7c5db3486005fad2495}

(I apologize for the quality of the code, but hey, it’s CTF-quality, not production-quality.)