Introduction

OverTheWire is a website that provides problems about SSH, and Linux Terminal navigation. The site follows a gaming-type format where users are introduced to different Linux Terminal navigation concepts through different rooms with rising difficulty as each room progresses. In order to progress, a user must firstly complete a room to navigate forward.

OverTheWire teaches the fundamentals about Linux Terminal navigation, concepts crucial to understanding Computer Science, and Cyber Security.

Why I did this

As an aspiring cybersecurity researcher, I need to understand the grasp, and scope of Linux Terminal Navigation.
One of the most efficient ways to learn is by conducting actual execution, and I believe that OverTheWire is a great recourse to use to help understand and ingrain these concepts effectively.

The Plan

There are a total of 34 total rooms in OverTheWire.
My goal is to complete at least 5 a day, in order to fully understand, and grasp Linux Terminal navigation techniques.

Answers

- Rooms 0 - 5

Rooms 0-5, were particularly very easy to navigate through.

Room 0 in particular, introduced the concept of SSH, which is a networking technique that allows for users to remotely connect to another computer's terminal through their own.

I had to firstly enter in the terminal SSH credentials, to access the first room, and then navigated from there to move forward.

These rooms were particularly easy, as they introduced the basic Linux Terminal navigation techniques, and directory commands such as CD, Cat, and ls.

This was basic basic fundamentals of identifying, and accessing files.

I experienced minimal difficulty.

- Rooms 5 - 10

Rooms 5 - 10, was where I first experienced some difficulty.

In room 6, I had some issues utilizing the find tool to navigate through a server, to find a particular directory.

I did everything correctly, but I didn't anticipate that I would experience issues with error messages. Luckily, there was a command, "2>/dev/null" that I used that helped me filter through error messages to successfully find the correct files.

There was some difficulty, and confusion here.

- Rooms 10 - 15

In rooms 10 -15, is where the difficulty started to happen.

The room challenges became exponentially more complex, and required additional navigation techniques, or techniques combined together in order to solve them.

Room 11, in particular is where I experienced my first difficulty with understanding the terminal navigation.

I was tasked with identifying a file, where all lowercase (a-z) and uppercase (A-Z) letters have been rotated by 13 positions.

Ultimately, this was a bit confusing to understand.

However, I realized that the room was requiring me to transform a string that was deciphered by a Caesar cipher that pushed letters forward by 13, and to solve and decipher the cipher was to use a tool called transform (tr).
My answer:

In room 12, I experienced some difficulty with the required instructions.

"The password for the next level is stored in the file data.txt, which is a hexdump of a file that has been repeatedly compressed. For this level it may be useful to create a directory under /tmp in which you can work. Use mkdir with a hard to guess directory name. Or better, use the command “mktemp -d”. Then copy the datafile using cp, and rename it using mv (read the manpages!)"

When creating new files, I found it difficult because the permissions granted were limited, so I was confused on what I had need to do accurately in order to progress.

My strategy was creating a new directory, and changing directories, then copying the original data.txt file from the room, and changing it's name to 'shitass.txt' .

Next, I needed to decode the hexdump, which I thought was simple, and so I used "xxd -r shitass.txt"

However, that method was fruitless as it didn't provide the desired outcome I wanted.

As it turned out; it was a fuck-fest of constant unzipping of files which took forever.

But ironically, at least it helped me ingrain the unzip process.

I used this YouTube Video to help me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4tROT45ipU

I had some trouble and am going to end it on lab 13, because it's erroring with an SSHkey sign-on. I will get to this eventually.

But I will reach and complete level 15 soon.