# NewPwd writeup (Challenge author perspective)
Unsurprisingly, this turned out to be one of if not the hardest challenges in the ctf. Here is the intended solution:
First of, if you tried solving this and just completely skipped the landing page you are going to have a hard time, since it describes exactly how the login prompt behaves. Basically, there is a user called admin which you need to attempt to log into. When you enter a wrong password you are also given the information in the source of the page about which character was wrong, so this allows you to brute the password one character at a time. The problem is that there exists a captcha. Each time you fail a captcha, your session is invalidated and the admin password is reset, so to successfully brute force the admin password (consisting of the string "keep going" followed by 64 random printable ascii characters) you will need to submit at least roughly 3000 correct captchas in a row. This is nearly impossible to do for a human, since some of the captchas are almost unreadable and one mistake will reset you to the beginning. This is the main challenge of NewPwd.
If you investigate further into the session cookie and decode it, you will find that it contains a captcha_type value. This is always an integer between 0-19, and it's suspicious that anything like this would exist. The next intended step would be to clear cookies and request captchas until you have two of the same "type". if you compare them, you will notice that both have the exact same noise and random lines. Therefore, if you request a bunch of captchas of the same type and run max() on all of them pixel by pixel, you can extract the raw noise and random lines of that captcha type. I call this the captcha overlay. Once we have all the captcha overlays, we can remove the noise from any captcha by just inverting the captcha overlay and adding it to the captcha. this gives us a much cleaner image, however the characters are still somewhat broken up since we don't actually know what the color of a pixel was behind the captcha overlay.
The second big thing to realize is that every time the same character appears in any captcha it is always translated and rotated exactly the same amount from its origin. Therefore, if we split each captcha into 5 parts of equal width, one for each character, we can then manually label these characters and take the min() of a bunch of the same character to get a very clear image of how that specific char looks. The labeling won't take longer than 15 minutes. With this we are almost at the solution.
Now to actually solve a captcha programatically we first need to split the captcha up into the 5 parts, one for each char. Then we simply compare each captcha char with all of the extracted clear characters to see which captcha char has the least white pixels where the clear image char has a black pixel, which means that that is the closest match and probably the letter used in the captcha. From here we we can brute force each character of the password individually solving captchas each request and we eventually get the flag after finding the whole password. This captcha solving method is 100% reliable if trained properly.
There may be different methods of creating a similar captcha solver, some of which may be better, but this was the one that i came up with. I would consider any custom written captcha solver to be within the intended solution.
As a side note, there was a bug in earlier versions of newpwd that caused the captcha to not regenerate if `/captcha` wasn't requested after a login attempt, basically allowing the same captcha answer to be submitted every time for every login attempt. This was though fixed as nobody had yet solved the challenge at the time of discovery of the unintended solution.
If you want to take a look at the challenge source or my captcha solver, it's in the same folder as this writeup file.