A penetration tester is conducting an IoT assessment and dumps the device firmware to a Linux machine. Which of the following Bash scripts would locate secrets in a custom binary executable…

The correct answer is A. cat initializedevice | strings | grep -i "password\|shadow\|token". A binary executable can contain embedded human-readable strings (including hardcoded credentials, tokens, or references to sensitive files). Extracting printable strings first and then grepping for common secret indicators is the appropriate approach for locating potential…

Submitted by packet_pusher· Mar 6, 2026Vulnerability discovery and analysis

Question

A penetration tester is conducting an IoT assessment and dumps the device firmware to a Linux machine. Which of the following Bash scripts would locate secrets in a custom binary executable downloaded from the device?

Options

Acat initializedevice | strings | grep -i "password|shadow|token"
Ccat initializedevice | base64 -d | grep -i "password|shadow|token"
Dcat initializedevice | grep -i "password|shadow|token"

How the community answered

(20 responses)

A
70% (14)
C
20% (4)
D
10% (2)

Explanation

A binary executable can contain embedded human-readable strings (including hardcoded credentials, tokens, or references to sensitive files). Extracting printable strings first and then grepping for common secret indicators is the appropriate approach for locating potential secrets within a custom binary.

Topics

#firmware analysis#binary analysis#Linux commands#strings command#grep

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