Static ain't always noise is a General Skills puzzle worth 20 points.

Description

Can you look at the data in this binary: static? This BASH script might help!

Solving

The binary provided in this puzzle is a 64 bit ELF:

daniel@wildcat ~ % file Downloads/static
Downloads/static: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=639391a8b15c579d69659462d3c935fa61693f17, not stripped
daniel@wildcat ~ % sha256sum Downloads/static
7f7d493ce8bff35a917386689dd74097686591f15eb88cee82bf0c57c2242a40  Downloads/static

The bash script provided is as follows. I did not end up using this script to solve the puzzle.

#!/bin/bash



echo "Attempting disassembly of $1 ..."


#This usage of "objdump" disassembles all (-D) of the first file given by 
#invoker, but only prints out the ".text" section (-j .text) (only section
#that matters in almost any compiled program...

objdump -Dj .text $1 > $1.ltdis.x86_64.txt


#Check that $1.ltdis.x86_64.txt is non-empty
#Continue if it is, otherwise print error and eject

if [ -s "$1.ltdis.x86_64.txt" ]
then
	echo "Disassembly successful! Available at: $1.ltdis.x86_64.txt"

	echo "Ripping strings from binary with file offsets..."
	strings -a -t x $1 > $1.ltdis.strings.txt
	echo "Any strings found in $1 have been written to $1.ltdis.strings.txt with file offset"



else
	echo "Disassembly failed!"
	echo "Usage: ltdis.sh <program-file>"
	echo "Bye!"
fi

Solving this puzzle was straightforward with strings. I typically pipe the output of strings into less so I can scroll up and down and search easier.

strings -a Downloads/static | less