Hack The Box · Misc Challenge

Art

Challenge details
Name	Art
Hint	Can you find the flag?
Difficulty	Easy - Retired [0]
Rated difficulty
First blood	dm0n
Creator	hexp

Analysis

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 to find the flag.

Colored block spiral supplied with the Art challenge — The image is executable code written in Piet.

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: esoteric programming languages. Wait...WHAT? How is this a program?

I hopped over to the Esolang language list. After hours of digging through languages, I finally stumbled across Piet. It fit the bill perfectly.

I used the nPiet online interpreter, uploaded the image, and executed it. Miraculously, it actually is a program.

nPiet interpreter output from the Art challenge — The Piet program executes and reveals the result.

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