base646464

As the name suggest, you could already tell that this challenge is about decoding base 64 encoded strings.
We were given a txt file that contains a encoded string, and a generate.js file that shows how the encoding works.

Experienced CTF Player

If you have participated in CTF games, you might be able to pull off this challenge without even looking at the source code. What I did was run base64 --decode a lot of times in bash and I was able to get the answer. This might seem abundant, but it's a good way to get a quick flag without writing a script.

cat cipher.txt | base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode| base64 --decode

Examine the Source Code

Here's the source code of the generate.jsfile:

const btoa = str => Buffer.from(str).toString('base64');
const fs = require("fs");
const flag = fs.readFileSync("flag.txt", "utf8").trim();
let ret = flag;
for(let i = 0; i < 25; i++) ret = btoa(ret);
fs.writeFileSync("cipher.txt", ret);

From the first like, we know that the functino btoa uses base64 encoding to encode the passed in str string. Then this functino is calleng 25 times in the for loop. So what we have to do decode the input cipher 25 times in base 64.

Python Script

We can use the python base64 module to handle the diciphering. All we need to do is run base64 decode 25 times and we sholud get the flag.

import base64
f = open('cipher.txt', 'r') 
cipher = f.read()
ptxt=cipher
for i in range(25):
    ptxt = base64.b64decode(ptxt)
print(ptxt)

Output :

python3 ape.py
b'flag{l00ks_l1ke_a_l0t_of_64s}'