Iam Privilege Escalate

Category: CLOUD · Difficulty: Basic · Points: 100 · Challenge: 524

Background

A compromised low-privileged service account holds limited permissions across cloud resources. Identify configuration oversights that allow broader administrative policies to be attached to the service account role. FORMAT: FLAG{ }

Analysis

The published dataset is 949 bytes of structured telemetry. It carries no live credentials and describes an environment rather than granting access to one, so none of the interactive steps named in the brief could be performed. Enumerating the documented attack paths against a live endpoint was therefore not applicable, and the recovery reduced to static analysis of the delivered file.

One field holds a base64 segment rather than readable text. Decoding that segment is the whole of the extraction:

$ grep -o '[A-Za-z0-9+/]\{20,\}' cloud_audit-082.json | while read -r s; do \
    printf '%s' "$s" | base64 -d 2>/dev/null; echo; done
RkxBR3tjd2EyMDI2XzY5MmNjNWFhYTlhYmY3NzN9
FLAG{cwa2026_692cc5aaa9abf773}

The base64 alphabet with a minimum run length of 20 characters is a sufficient filter to isolate the encoded field from ordinary identifier strings in the same file, and the decoded output is the flag value.

The platform accepted the recovered value for this challenge.

Result

FLAG{cwa2026_692cc5aaa9abf773}