Launch Date - SMP CTF 2024 - Selection Round

In this challenge, we need to find the product launch date from a PCAP file. We can start by searching for keywords that may help us find a lead.

We can use either use Wireshark, a traffic analysis tool, or use the strings command on Linux. For large PCAP files, we could also save the output we receive from the strings command in a text file so that we can search more easily. To do so, we run this command:

strings challenge_file.pcapng > challenge_file.txt

Now we can open this file in any text editing file and search for keywords or terms of interest. In this challenge, we're looking for a product's launch date. So our possible terms of interest are 'product', 'launch', 'date', etc.

After searching for the keyword 'launch' and scrolling for a bit, we can find a conversation between the boss and an employee about a product. In that conversation, we can also see them talking about the launch date.

From the conversation, we get the exact date. We still don't have the month and year. If you look closely, you can find the month and year in some of the <span> tags. These point to the time of the conversation. Considering the context of the conversation, we can construct the whole date and get our flag.