Force Push

Scenario

We pulled a copy of the crownspire-deploy repository off a leaked Cinderbound backup. Word is the production warden's key for the reliquary got committed by mistake and then cleaned up before anyone noticed. The current history looks spotless. Recover what they tried to bury.

Solution

Given the challenge name and the fact that we have to recover something from a repository makes it easy to determine that we will need to use git. The first thing I thought to look for was lost data in the repository, this was done using the command git fsck --full --unreachable --lost-found while inside the crownspire-deploy folder. It reveals a buried commit which could have important information inside.

We can run git show on the first commit and from looking at the output, we are able to find the flag.