On the night of Friday the 13th, I came across an interesting repository on GitHub.
At first I did not understand what it was, after all “gitstery” is not a very obvious name. I read through the README
(seems like I missed the part where they say it was designed to be solved using git commands alone) and got some idea of
what it was. It seemed really interesting and I was bored, so I cloned it. There was an instructions.txt file which
contained…. instructions.
1A murder had been committed in Git Town!
2
3The detective, Kyle Pumbinner, said the crime scene report is on the `gtpd-archive` branch. He
4doesn't really remember the report ID... But he knows it was the first report he submitted after his
5son's ninth birthday (which was Saturday, July 20th), and it was the only report he submitted that
6week.
7
8When you find a suspect, you'd probably want to interview them. To do that, first find out their
9address. To go to that street, look for the street's name in the repository (Hint: it's a tag). To
10go to house number N on that street, go to the Nth ancestor. If you'd like to inspect the
11perimeters, you can look into the commit's contents - it'll contain a hash that you can view with
12certain git commands.
13
14Think you found the culprit? Check your answer with the following command:
15
16 echo "John Doe" | git hash-object --stdin | grep -iq -f /dev/stdin <(git show solution) && echo 'You found the murderer!' || echo 'No cigar, chief... Try again.'
17
18Replace John Doe with the name of the suspect that you want to check.
19
20For an extra challenge, try and solve the mystery without ever using `git checkout`.
Spoiler Warning: The following section contains spoilers for gitstery. I suggest you try it on your own before reading. Or you can read this as a guide. {: .notice–warning}
The instructions hint that we need to check out the gtpd-archive branch. We can do so by using git checkout gtpd-archive.
It seems there is no difference between the two branches, all the files are the same.
Files in the gtpd-archive branch
So we check the logs, using git log and we see all the reports here. The date starts from December and, as indicated by
the instructions files, we need to find the logs which were submitted in the week after July 20th. We can search the log
by typing /July and pressing the n key to go to the next search result. There is only one report by Kyle Pumbinner in
that week.
Git log showing the report we need
Hmm, so we need to check out the detectives/kpumbinner branch.
1git checkout detectives/kpumbinner
Files in the detectives/kpumbinner branch
Here we have a new directory with an access.log inside. There are three entries of BACKDOOR_332 here, we need to find
the names of the people who made these entries. There is an aptly named git subcommand for this, it is called git blame,
running git blame access.log will show the names of the people who made each entry in the file. At this point you could
search through this by using /BACKDOOR_332, but here we can use the very useful grep tool.
1git blame access.log | grep BACKDOOR_332
This gives the names of the three people who accessed the backdoor
Now, we need to investigate these people. Going back to the instructions.txt, it describes the process to investigate a person. First, we need to find the person’s address. This is simple, we just have to search for the person’s name in the residents.txt file. Using cat and grep commands, we can easily get the address (or you can open the files using an editor and search in it).
1$ cat residents.txt | grep "Lyndon"
2Lyndon Huskupper 73 Tamworth Drive
1$ cat residents.txt | grep "Cosmo"
2Cosmo Siwkonk 26 Balcombe Close
1$ cat residents.txt | grep "Brock Stuickard"
2Brock Stuickard 9 Beaconside
Again going back to instructions.txt, we find a way to investigate the addresses. Now, we have to look for the street
name in git tags. git tag -l lists all the tags, then we use grep to get the required tags.
1$ git tag -l | grep "tamworth"
2street/tamworth_drive
3$ git tag -l | grep "balcombe"
4street/balcombe_close
5$ git tag -l | grep "beaconside"
6street/beaconside
Now we are ready to investigate the addresses. To visit the address, we checkout that tag and inspect the files there.
Checking out tags is as simple as git checkout <tag name>, for example git checkout street/tamworth_drive. We see
a new file here named investigate which contains some random letters. According to instructions.txt, this is a hash.
We haven’t reached the house number yet, so let’s do that. With the hint from instructions.txt, we look at the logs.
The contents have the house number, street name and the investigation report/conversation. We can search for /73 (notice the space after 73, this is because the commit hashes can also contain the number 73) and get the investigation
result.
commit f8a5b218b1eaee3b111ae5ef536f919e8d3afca2
Author: Dolores Wholfump <mayor@gittown.gov>
Date: Tue Jan 1 00:00:00 2019 +0000
73 Tamworth Drive
No one's home...
Maybe take a look around the perimeter?
How do we look around? That’s easy, we simply checkout that commit and take a look at the files. To checkout to a
specific commit, copy the commit hash and do git checkout <commit hash here> like git checkout f8a5b218b1eaee3b111ae5ef536f919e8d3afca2.
We can see that the investigate file has changed, so we need to somehow get the actual contents of it. For that,
we use a git subcommand called cat-file can be used, this subcommand is used to find information about repository
objects (which are hashed). git cat-file -t is used to get the object’s type (in this case, it is a blob which is
a general type for files in git) and git cat-file -p is used to print the object’s content.
1$ cat investigate
222f733298423b814f1da31bee3e0063c72ed6e71
3$ git cat-file -p 22f733298423b814f1da31bee3e0063c72ed6e71
4"There's no one answering the door. Obviously you won't break in because you don't have a warrant or
5anything. But nothing's wrong with looking around the place...
6
7You check around the house, there's no car. Not even a driveway. You do find a bike resting against
8the fence. It's pretty close to the factory, so makes sense the suspect bikes to work.
9
10Just to make sure, you ask some of the neighbors, they confirm that the suspect doesn't own a car.
11One of them says he doesn't even have a license.
12
13Another neighbor says he saw the suspect coming back from work on the day of the murder at about
145PM, they chatted for a bit before his sister picked him up to visit their parents. They live pretty
15far away, so that places him away from Git Town at the time of the murder."
Hmm, looks like this one is not our culprit. (They seem to emphasize having a car a lot for some reason…). We can now look at the other suspects.
1$ git checkout street/balcombe_close
2$ git log | grep -5 "26 "
3commit bc6870d8093a33d9a69acc94a1cda16ee2d7195d
4Author: Dolores Wholfump <mayor@gittown.gov>
5Date: Tue Jan 1 00:00:00 2019 +0000
6"
7 26 Balcombe Close
8
9 No one's home...
10
11 You can take a look around though.
12"
13$ git checkout bc6870d8093a33d9a69acc94a1cda16ee2d7195d
14HEAD is now at bc6870d 26 Balcombe Close
15$ cat investigate
16c8411c73e49372dbdb644beef2ea841b403fc476
17$ git cat-file -p c8411c73e49372dbdb644beef2ea841b403fc476
18"Nobody's home. From the stack of letters in the mailbox nobody's been here for a good few days.
19
20Without a warrant you can't get into the house, but you can still checkout the area. Maybe talk with
21some of the neighbors.
22
23The guy next door says he barely ever spoke to the suspect, "was a bit of a loner" is what he says.
24Doesn't know what type of vehicle he drives.
25
26You take a stroll around the house, there's a back porch that probably seen better days. You spot a
27driveway next to it leading to a garage. The door's open and you see a green Hyundai parked there."
Hmm. Strange. Now onto the third suspect.
1$ git checkout street/beaconside
2HEAD is now at 5e37024 Beaconside
3$ git log | grep -B 4 -A 21 " 9 "
4commit 92f6e05c6aa06c791f402d7e19649fa1f0ec76c6
5Author: Dolores Wholfump <mayor@gittown.gov>
6Date: Tue Jan 1 00:00:00 2019 +0000
7"
8 9 Beaconside
9
10 Yeah, of course I used the backdoor to the factory, that's the closest entrance to the freezer and I
11 brought in some ingrediants that can't really stand the heat.
12
13 At the time of the murder I was at a block party right down the street from here, we threw the party
14 for one of the neighbors who got back from the hospital after an accident. I was with my kids. You
15 can ask anyone who's been there.
16
17 Oh wait, you know what? We took a picture... Let me get my phone.
18
19 See? That's me, that's the neighbor, here's my little girl. And you see the timestamp?
20
21 So yeah, I really don't have anything to do with that... Barely knew the victim...
22
23 But you know what? I did see someone rushing out of the factory... He got into a green Hyundai, you
24 don't see many of those around here... Probably a rental. I didn't catch his face, was just weird
25 seeing someone running off like that... Come to think about it, maybe that person had something to
26 do with it?
27
28 Anyways, best of luck catching whoever did it!
29"
30$ git checkout 92f6e05c6aa06c791f402d7e19649fa1f0ec76c6
31Previous HEAD position was 5e37024 Beaconside
32HEAD is now at 92f6e05 9 Beaconside
33$ cat investigate
34d1278ebc164050fe1e5526fbba6a8cfbe763f1d2
35$ git cat-file -p d1278ebc164050fe1e5526fbba6a8cfbe763f1d2
36You ask around with the neighbors, just to make sure. Everyone you ask verify that suspect's alibi.
Aha, we have a new lead. The culprit has a green Hyundai. As we saw before, the second suspect has a green Hyundai. That suspect’s name is Cosmo Siwkonk. We can now verify if we have solved the case by using the command given in instructions.txt.
1$ echo "Cosmo Siwkonk" | git hash-object --stdin | grep -iq -f /dev/stdin <(git show solution) && echo 'You found the murderer!' || echo 'No cigar, chief... Try again.'
2You found the murderer!
We solved the case!
Well, that was fun. Checkout the repository here. Give a thumbs up if this was helpful and/or interesting.