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BroncoCTF Challenge Hid Flag Inside Krita Text Brush Preset Metadata

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A BroncoCTF forensics challenge presented participants with a file called Bundle_99, which lacked a clear extension but was identified as a Krita resource bundle — a ZIP archive used to package brush presets and assets. Extracting the archive revealed a single brush preset file, Brush 99.kpp, which despite its extension was actually a PNG image storing full brush configuration as embedded XML metadata. A standard grep for the flag prefix returned no results, meaning the flag was not stored in any plaintext file within the archive. Deeper inspection using exiftool on the .kpp file exposed a lengthy XML Preset block containing dozens of paintop parameters, among which a kis_text_brush definition held the flag in its text attribute. Krita's text brush feature allows users to type a string that becomes the brush stamp shape, and the challenge author had simply entered the flag there and saved it as a custom brush.

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