[TWCTF-2016: PPC] Make a Palindrome! Writeup.

Challenge description:

Your task is to make a palindrome string by rearranging and concatenating given words.

Input Format: N <Word_1> <Word_2> … <Word_N>
Answer Format: Rearranged words separated by space.
Each words contain only lower case alphabet characters.

Example Input: 3 ab cba c
Example Answer: ab c cba

You have to connect to ppc1.chal.ctf.westerns.tokyo:31111(TCP) to answer the problem.

$ nc ppc1.chal.ctf.westerns.tokyo 31111

• Time limit is 3 minutes

• The maximum number of words is 10.

• There are 30 cases. You can get flag 1 on case 1. You can get flag 2 on case 30.

• samples.7z Server connection examples.

This challenge was pretty simple. I used the given “example.py”  and added the following function to it:

def makepal(l):
	for b in itertools.permutations(l, len(l)):
		str1 = ''.join(b)
		if str(str1) == str(str1)[::-1]:
			print b
			return b

Then I called it using the original script structure:

answer = makepal(words)

And the server returned the flag:
TWCTF{Hiyokko_Tsuppari}

The full script can be found here.