MQTT-Explorer VS CyberChef

Quote from MQTT Explorer

Sounds like you're on a good path tracking the problem to aws, not the esp. First of all, I'd try to make it work with a "proven" solution, then move on to your own implementation. I have had good success using http://mqtt-explorer.com/ on windows to diagnose a similar situation. Mqtt explorer gives you very granular control over endpoints and topics, so might be helpful to you too.

I would suggest using Mqtt explorer (http://mqtt-explorer.com/) to see how often the sensor updates its values. This as a first step to narrow down the problem.

Here are a few alternatives: http://mqtt-explorer.com/ https://mqttx.app/

Use MQTT Explorer to view and generate messages: http://mqtt-explorer.com/

For MQTT debugging, I like MQTT explorer

You can write test programs to send very specific messages to simulate errors, or simulate entire components that aren't written yet. There are also free programs like MQTT Explorer that will let you browse the message traffic, generate messages manually, log whatever you cant, and even graph your values if you happen to send numerical values (that is really cool when you do some long-term testing).

To use a local server can let you control all details of your full messaging chain. Try other clients can make you away from the ill behaviors or bugs of specific client. I recently demonstrate how easy a free MQTT client (MQTT explorer) send to a free MQTT database on Windows 10 in my video.

A useful tool is MQTT Explorer. You can connect to your broker and see what changes when you use the light through an app or switch or whatever. This should help you understand the manner in which the light talks with mqtt. Once you think you have understood it, you can use explorer to publish test messages to see if it works as desired.

Then we take the encrypted text and use CyberChef to decrypt it.

Let's go to CyberChef and insert our pieces of evidence.

A parameter was changed from '2AMBCgIQBg' to 'CgIIAdgDAQ%3D%3D' which is just the correct base64 encoding they should have been using the entire time.

I don't think this was a hostile action by Google, I think someone just added better input validation for security reasons and it accidently broke the bad requests they were sending.

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=URL_Decode()From_Ba...

❗This is indeed the flag, but the text is encrypted with Base64. Usually, the presence of padding character "=" indicates that's Base64 type of encoding (but that's only one of the hints). To decrypt it, we can use CyberChef. Copy-paste the text and we either:

It uses a combination of magic bytes (like the `file` command), entropy analysis and character frequency detection to determine whether an output is likely to be of interest to the user.

The file type mechanism is written here[0]. There's a list of all signatures we detect here[1].

[0] https://github.com/gchq/CyberChef/blob/master/src/core/lib/F...

I think this can be deciphered using CyberChef...