Cicadas and 3301 (An Online Mystery) Pt.1

Sky

Jordan812 Posts

January 22 2012 07:54 GMT

...and it all started with...

On the 5th of January a message went out. Many claim the first sighting of the message was 4chan's /b/ board. A picture calling for a challenge, for egos and smarts alike. The result... a puzzle that many are still trying to solve to this very day.

I came in quite late, so i'll just refer to the previous puzzle solvers as "they".

Now the data may not be in that picture, but it was in the original (I verifed, and can verify for others). Many people fiddled around with it. Until someone opened up the picture in a text editor and found a rather odd message in the bottom of the picture in seemingly plain text.

TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says "lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk"

Quite an odd message from the fourth roman emporer TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR AVGVSTVS GERMANICVS. Some figured out the hint, the latter message wasn't garbage... it was a message using a caeser shift cipher with ascii.

A caeser shift cipher had been used back in the day since there weren't many other ciphers around. It had a great thing going for it, it was fast and easy to encrypt and decrypt a message. This cipher works by shifting the values of your message, either up or down, by however whatever value you give it. If you used a value of 1 and the english alphabet, then A = B and D = E.

An example of a caeser shift of 4 (up):

Normal Message: PANCAKES
Encrypted Message: TERGEOIW

In order to get the original message, a person would just need the value of 4 and then go down each letter by that much. In the case of this 3301 puzzle, the caeser shift also went up 4 values (which requires decryptors to go down 4 values), but the data it used wasn't strictly from the english alphabet, it was from ascii.

The result of decrypting the message? A link, to another image: http://i.imgur.com/m9sYK.jpg.

I'm going to go through this whole thing rather slow. I want to hopefully get as technical as I can with some of the way the messages were solved, and if I go to fast I'll reach the point I'm at and might risk expulsion from "the puzzle".

For anyone wanting to read the bulk of what happened; Granted these sources will stop at a point, but they don't stop at the ending... they only stop at a point in which keeping info from non-participants was demanded.

http://www.clevcode.org/cicada-3301/ (amazing recount of a lot of the puzzle)
http://wiki.n0v4.com/index.php/3301:Cicada

Birdie

New Zealand4438 Posts

January 22 2012 08:03 GMT

Kewl, looks a bit like an ARG. If you like this stuff you should check out Marble Hornets.

The devs for Path of Exile hid beta keys with this sort of thing too, which is cool.

Sky

Jordan812 Posts

January 22 2012 08:07 GMT

On January 22 2012 17:03 zany_001 wrote:
Kewl, looks a bit like an ARG. If you like this stuff you should check out Marble Hornets.

The devs for Path of Exile hid beta keys with this sort of thing too, which is cool.

Yeah, one of the big assumptions is that it is an ARG. While this part of the puzzle might seem easy, it gets pretty damn tough and further into it, it includes messages scattered across the globe - polyalphabetic ciphers and above - stenography - riddles involving books and poems.

It's pretty damn fun for whatever it is. If you take a look at either of the links at the bottom, you'll see the amount of effort the puzzlemakers put into this thing.