dotdotdot

by tulip
๐Ÿšฉ CTFs IrisCTF 2025 radio
dotdotdot / IrisCTF 2025

Description

I picked up this transmission, but it's way too noisy to make any sense of it. Can you give it a shot?
Flag format: irisctf{th3_m3ss4ge} in all lowercase. Replace spaces with underscores. Add curly braces.

We are given an .iq file. For those new to radio, this stands for in-phase and quadrature data, and is commonly used in storage of radio transmission and such due to its compact and efficient โ€œformatโ€ (itโ€™s really just a big stream of bytes).

The title of the challenge suggests morse code. Letโ€™s open the file in a tool such as Inspectrum which can open and interpret .iq data.

inspectrum morse code

Sure enough, there it is! All we need to do is transform this back into readable text. Letโ€™s first convert it to something in text, then pass it to a morse decoder.

. means a short, _ means a long. 
/ is used to separate letters for easier reading. 

.. / ._. / .. / ... / _._. / _ / .._. / _. / _____ / .____ / ... / ...__ / __. / _____ / _ / _. / _____ / _ / .... / .____ / _. / __. / _____ / _. / __ / _.__ / __ / _____ / ._. / ... / .

Using a decoder such as one like this, we get the flag!

Flag: irisctf{n01s3_g0t_n0th1ng_0n_my_m0rse}

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