About competition-stego-media
A CTF skill for investigating steganography in media containers, hidden channels, and appended payloads. It is intended as a specialization after `$ctf-sandbox-orchestrator` establishes the sandbox and evidence priorities.
Key features
- 01Container and metadata inspection
- 02Evidence-ranked channel analysis
- 03Layered payload reconstruction
- 04Reproducible extraction tracking
- 05Final payload verification
Use cases
- 01Checking media files for appended archives
- 02Comparing alpha, palette, and LSB channels
- 03Tracing video frame or audio signal clues
- 04Preserving an extracted payload chain
Install
Copy the command and run it in a terminal.
npx skills add https:/ / github.com/ zhaoxuya520/ reverse-skill --skill competition-stego-mediaAfter installing, type/competition-stego-mediain Claude Code to confirm it loaded.
Bundled filesagents/openai.yamlreferences/stego-media.md
Details
From the project READMECompetition Stego Media
Use this skill only as a downstream specialization after $ctf-sandbox-orchestrator is already active and has established sandbox assumptions, node ownership, and evidence priorities. If that has not happened yet, return to $ctf-sandbox-orchestrator first.
Use this skill when the challenge lives inside a media container, hidden channel, or appended payload rather than a conventional crypto blob.
Reply in Simplified Chinese unless the user explicitly requests English.
Quick Start
- Confirm the real container type, dimensions, duration, codec, and chunk layout before guessing a hidden layer.
- Check metadata, thumbnails, sidecar files, and appended trailers before deeper signal-domain work.
- Rank candidate channels by evidence: alpha, palette, LSB, transform-domain residue, frame order, or container slack.
- Preserve each extracted layer separately so the transform chain stays reproducible.
- Stop when the hidden payload is reproduced, not merely suspected.
Workflow
1. Establish Container Truth
- Inspect headers, chunk tables, EXIF or document metadata, container indexes, thumbnails, and file size anomalies.
- Compare declared format against observed structure to catch polyglots, appended archives, or malformed trailers.
- Record exact offsets, frame numbers, or channel boundaries that look promising.
2. Inspect Candidate Channels
- Check alpha, palette order, RGB or YUV planes, LSBs, spectrogram features, document object streams, or video frame deltas.
- Prefer evidence-driven attempts over brute forcing every transform.
- Note whether the payload is plain bytes, another media layer, compressed data, or an encrypted blob.
3. Reconstruct The Hidden Payload Path
- Keep the chain in order: container -> channel or carrier -> extraction -> decompression or decode -> final parse.
- Separate extraction success from final interpretation; a channel hit is not the same as artifact recovery.
- If the problem becomes primarily about cryptography after extraction, hand off to the broader crypto skill.
Read This Reference
- Load
references/stego-media.mdfor the media checklist, channel ranking guide, and evidence packaging.
What To Preserve
- File structure facts: offsets, chunks, frame numbers, stream names, metadata keys, and trailer size
- Intermediate extractions and the exact command or transform used to produce them
- The final recovered payload and the channel that produced it