The Hillside Haven

Personal Rating: Hard

This challenge was notorious during the CTF event, because it was really hard to find the exact address required for the flag. Even very some of the best teams struggled to find the name of the street.

We start off with an image and actually a lot of information right away:

Hillside Haven Challenge Image

The Challenge description describes a scenic landscape in the western hills. The House number is written on the garage (356) and we are told that the flag format is HTB{356<Streetname>Road}

So the "only" thing to do here really, was to find the name of the street. This however, proofed to be incredibly tedious.

Google reverse image search returned similar houses in Florida, California, San Francisco etc. From this and the vegetation and climate, the image was likely taken at the western US coast. Additionally, the colors on the blurred license plate would match license plates in California. The car can easily be identified to be a Honda Fit, but that information is not relevant.

Since I was stuck at Google Images, I tested some geo guesser AI tools. Especially yeschat.ai turned out to return impressive results. These are the locations these tools returned:

https://yeschat.ai/ -> Berkeley, CA https://geospy.net/ -> Oakland / Berkeley, CA https://findpiclocation.com/ -> SanFran https://picarta.ai/ -> American Canyon, CA

With the image and some targeted questions to YesChat, I could narrow it down to Berkeley or Oakland in California

• The image was likely taken from the north side of the house, given by the shadows

• "Winding Roads" suggests Oakland or Berkeley Hills

I tried "flying" over the map and searching for the house number 356, but that was very tedious. It seems like the house numbers in California are assigned randomly :)

Remembering the story description, I started searching in the western hills of Berkeley. In Thousand Oaks, several houses, bins and the vegetation looked very similar to what you see on the image. After going through the streets in Google Maps for a while, I actually found the house at 356 Coventry Road, CA.

HTB{356_CoventryRoad}