This challenge when I got it, I did not even know its description, but I really like that kind of challenge that shows us the source code and it was not so time consuming to kill this challenge.
Analyzing the code above, we can see that it receives the parameters via $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] and creates a variable action to separate what comes from parse_str()
A little further down, we have some checks being made, sending a get with the value of “auth”, we entered into the condition we need to solve the challenge.
From this moment, we have 3 if’s, of which in fact they are of no use, however, we have the variable $hashed_password which is used in the last if to check its value and give us the flag!
The real intent of the challenge was to explore the parse_str().
By doing a small test, we can see that using the parse_str() to get a value already set, will cause this value to be overwritten.
$var = 'xxxxx';
parse_str($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']);
echo $var;
Sending the value via GET, it is possible to notice that the overwriting of the values happens, so we just need to do this in the challenge.
