Hint

07 - Happy Eyes
Barbara really loves to chat with all friends.

To express joy they use the characters ^^ which represent eyes of a smiling face.

Can you find this happy flag?

Hint: Offset by 2

1xT-Gcm8FV-5cYN-iBc-syHW

Approach

This one is tricky. The offset 2 indicates that there is a tool out there that takes an input. Looking at the text, it contains c, m, 1, and 8, so it may just be a scramble of the text. After playing with a lot of tools online, I found a super-tool that has all sorts of cipher varieties:

After that, another hint came along from the @codemashctf twitter account:

The hint was subtle, but the On the fence portion just didn’t fit. A quick search of the ciphers that contain fence, and you find the Rail Fence cipher. I found a tool that included the offset option.

Setting the offset to 2 results in:

cm18-FxVs-T5yc-YHNG-WicB

Return to the full breakdown of the Codemash CTF