WIDE is a very easy reversing challenge on Hack The Box. The description is “We’ve received reports that Draeger has stashed a huge arsenal in the pocket dimension Flaggle Alpha. You’ve managed to smuggle a discarded access terminal to the Widely Inflated Dimension Editor from his headquarters, but the entry for the dimension has been encrypted. Can you make it inside and take control?” I first start by running the “file” command to see what we are working with.

Since it is an ELF file we can go ahead and run it in our VM.

The first thing that pops out is the encrypted dimension. So let’s examine it. It asks for a key and we put some random letters in it to test it and we get back that the key was incorrect.

Now we open it up in Binary Ninja to try and find where the input is compared with the correct key. Binary Ninja opens with us in the menu function which also seems to be the main function.

If we scroll down a little bit we will see the secret key is hard coded in plain text.

We re-run the program and use the secret key and just like that the challenge is completed and we have the flag.

This challenge truly lives up to it’s difficulty. You can even solve it with just a text editor. Here I have it open in Atom and the key is still just as easy to find. Thanks for reading and happy reversing!