Hack The Box · Misc Challenge

Art

Legacy source note: The repository file named 0ld-is-G0ld.html contains the Art challenge walkthrough. The original content is preserved here rather than silently replaced.

Challenge details present in the legacy source
Name	Art
Category	Misc
Difficulty	Easy
First blood	dm0n
Creator	hexp

As usual, download the file and check the hint. The file on this one is a weird spiral of colored blocks and the hint is simply:

Colored block spiral supplied with the Art challenge — The challenge image is a Piet program.

This one was a doozy for me. I had never seen a programming language based on shades of color blocks. I'm not going to lie, I checked the forums and got a nudge from someone who had completed it. The nudge was esoteric programming languages. Wait...WHAT? How is this a program? So I hopped over to the Esolang language list.

Hours of digging through languages later, I finally stumbled across Piet. It fit the bill perfectly, so I used an online Piet compiler called nPiet.

I uploaded the image and executed it. Miraculously, it actually is a program.

nPiet interpreter output from the Art challenge — The Piet image executes successfully.

Hunh! Who knew color blocks could be used as a program.