Origin Trace

Level

medium

Type

OSINT

I stumbled across this photo on a website once, and it’s been on my mind ever since. I’d love to uncover the story behind it what device was used to snap it, when exactly it was captured, and most of all, which city cradles this intriguing building in its skyline.

Flag format: YUCTF{phone name_date captured}

Use exiftool to extract metadata from the image.

ExifTool Version Number         : 13.10
File Name                       : image.jpeg
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 147 kB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2025:05:09 22:51:02+03:00
File Access Date/Time           : 2025:05:19 01:54:04+03:00
File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2025:05:10 00:42:57+03:00
File Permissions                : -rw-rw-r--
File Type                       : JPEG
File Type Extension             : jpg
MIME Type                       : image/jpeg
Comment                         : MTM1NjczMjM2NjQKYnJ1bmFyYWdvbmVzaQ==
Image Width                     : 907
Image Height                    : 419
Encoding Process                : Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
Bits Per Sample                 : 8
Color Components                : 3
Y Cb Cr Sub Sampling            : YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
Image Size                      : 907x419
Megapixels                      : 0.380

Decode the Base64 string MTM1NjczMjM2NjQKYnJ1bmFyYWdvbmVzaQ== to get:

echo "MTM1NjczMjM2NjQKYnJ1bmFyYWdvbmVzaQ==" | base64 -d

13567323664
brunaragonesi

Upload the image to Google Lens and include brunaragonesi in the search query.

Visit Bruna Ragonesi 011 to confirm the source using the image ID and username.

From the Flickr page, identify:

Device used: iPhone 4S
Capture date: March 1, 2014

Flag: YUCTF{iPhone 4S_March 1, 2014}