Riddle Registry : picoCTF

this is the problem , so without wasting any more time let’s download the pdf

this is the pdf, initially I thought the text will be there below the black marks but no that’s not the case

even it says no flag here, nice try though! haha so let’s look at the clues :

clue 1 : Don't be fooled by the visible text; it’s just a decoy!

clue 2: Look beyond the surface for hidden clues

ok so what can be hidden ? any metadata ? yes so there is a website to extract the metadata
https://www.metadata2go.com

here I am getting the author name in base64 format there’s a trick of finding out a string is base64 or not if that is base 64 the = will be of power of 2 there can be 0 1 2 or 4 also there can be # nothing except that in the base64 format
so now let’s try to decode this from base64

gotcha