CICADA 3301 - PARTE 3 - CELLBIT

In 2012, an anonymous image was posted on the internet, seeking for highly intelligent individuals. Hidden inside the image file, a code was found that once solved, became a link. This link led to another puzzle, that led to a Reddit, that led to a book.

Solving the code of that book, a message was found: "Call us on the phone number 2143909608. " Calling that phone number a recording with another puzzle was played. "There are three prime numbers associated with the original 'final.

jpg' image" Solving that puzzle, you went to a website with a list of coordinates. And these coordinates were spread across the globe. In the U.

S. , in Australia, in France, in South Korea and in Poland. Going in person in these coordinates, posters with a cicada logo and a QR code below it were found.

This QR code had another puzzle, that once solved, revealed a Deep Web link. In this Deep Web link, they asked you to input your email, because they would send you a link, for an exclusive puzzle, the final test, to get recruited by the Cicada 3301. Accessing that Deep Web link, we find the next puzzle.

"This message will be shown only once, here's a message cryptographed with RSA (the crypt:RSA perl module is available at CPAN). " And right after this, a bunch of random characters, in other words, our encrypted message. Here is the public key used to encrypt.

Note that it has a low bits module and, for that reason, it is breakable. Below that, we have 2 values, one value 'e' and the other 'n'. The encrypted message is a number.

Each person to arrive here received an unique message, encrypted with an unique key. You must not collaborate with other players. Sharing your message or key will result in not receiving the next step.

Good luck, 3301. " Ok, now the first thing you have to do with this puzzle is to save it elsewhere because, as the message said, "This message will be shown only once. " So, if you reloaded the page, the whole puzzle would be deleted, to prevent other people from using your link and solving your puzzle.

It is your puzzle and no one else can access it. Now, come with me. RSA is a cryptography system that uses 2 different keys.

One public and the other private, with a very similar logic to the PGP system that we've seen before. The public key is used to hide the message and encrypt it, and the private key is used to unlock the message and decrypt it. But what matters for us to solve it is the values 'n' and 'e' that Cicada mentioned, they are the public key, and the value 'n' is the result of the multiplication of two big prime numbers.

So, if you manage to figure out what the two prime numbers which were multiplied to form that 'n' were, you could decipher the private key and decipher the message. This 'n' value is pretty small, so we can decipher what the prime numbers were. And yes, this value here is small compared to what normally is the 'n' value.

If the 'n' value were as it usually is, which is this one, you would take years to calculate exactly what the prime numbers that formed this were. But as the 'n' value is very small, we can crack it. So the path to figure out what the elements that form a multiplication are: factorization.

Factorization is basically this, you get the final result and try to find out what all the possible multiplications that result in this number are. So it's best to get a tool that isolates all prime numbers and check if they are factorials of the final number. After some hours processing many prime numbers, you finally reach 2 prime numbers that perfectly multiply into the final result.

Now you have to generate the private key to be able to decipher the message. For that, you have to go to the system that produced the keys, and Cicada wrote what the system used was. It was the perl module which was written in the message.

This way, we only have to take the two prime numbers we found, together with the number 'e' that Cicada gave us, use the perl cryptography module to find the keys that it generates with those values, and we'll have the public key and the private key, and we can decipher what the message was. And the message was this: a bunch of numbers. And once more you take this bunch of numbers, go back to the .

onion link, and type slash plus these numbers and you find yet another puzzle. But, hold on, before we continue, you must be wondering "If these puzzles were exclusive to each person and no one else could see them, then how are we accessing them? ".

"Hello. You have shared your information online. You have now been totally removed.

Even if you decipher the key, it doesn't matter, because you've shown that you're not reliable to follow even such simple instructions. Thank you for participating up to this point. Goodbye.

" This is a message that appeared on the internet and it is signed by Cicada with the PGP, so it really is theirs. So that was what they send to the person who leaked these puzzles. CHAPTER: THE LAST PUZZLE Back to the puzzle now, inputting the correct answer on the website, you would receive another email with an audio file.

More specifically, a . midi file. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, and is basically a way to digitally write musical notes and their duration.

Well, opening the MIDI file sent by Cicada, it plays this song: So, in the email, there was this MIDI file which is basically a file with information from a song and a message: "This song is your own path. Another stop on the road towards enlightenment. Follow it, and share not.

Let the chorus be your guide to the depths: Let the Priests of the Ravens of dawn, no longer in deadly black, with hoarse notes curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted brethren, whom, tyrant, he calls free lay the bound or build the roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that wishes but acts not.

For everything that lives is Holy. " What we just read, is an excerpt from a book called "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell", which, yes, is the same book we used to solve the second chance puzzle earlier. This patch, from the work: "A Song of Liberty", is called "Chorus".

Initially, opening the MIDI file you would only hear one song and you would think you only had to work with it. But if you use softwares that convert MIDI files to text, you discover that there also is a second song hidden in this file. The puzzle told us to use this chorus as our guide, so taking each letter from this chorus and organizing them on the notes order in the hidden music, an interesting pattern appeared.

Each letter in this text was equivalent to the same note always. That is, each time there was an "L", it was equivalent to this note. Every "E" fits with this note, and so on.

With this information, we can create an alphabet with the musical notes, each note representing a letter. Nice, now that we have this alphabet of musical notes that we found on the hidden song in the file. Let's go to the song that was not hidden and change the musical notes we have into their respective letters.

The problem is that there were no notes equal to the second song. No note that appeared in the second song was equal to the first. So this alphabet we assembled from musical notes was nearly useless.

But actually not so much. Analyzing this musical alphabet, clearly, the first letters were represented by shorter notes and the last letters were represented by longer notes. So we have to go back to the initial song, organize each note from shortest to longest and, substituting with this alphabet the musical notes with their respective letters, we find the final message.

"Very good, you proved to be very dedicated to get so far, to acquire the enlightenment, create a PGP key for your email address, and upload it on the MIT keys server then encrypt the following list of words using the Cicada 3301 public key. Sign with your key. Then, send the encrypted and signed text to the email which you received your numbers from.

Your words are: house, elephant, tongue, store, ball, intellect, roof, far, ear and fight. " These are, obviously, random words. Only so no one would be able to guess what words would be, they sent only a bunch of random words.

So you basically had to get the public Cicada PGP key, encrypt those words, get a key you've created, your private PGP key and mark that message with your signature. And now you send that message to Cicada, they will verify if that message has been signed by your email and if the words are correct. And if everything is correct, you're in.

After all this process, You would receive a final email, an invitation. . .

the long-awaited Cicada 3301 recruitment. In 2012, on the internet groups that were together talking about how to solve the puzzles, the people who supposedly received that email, simply disappeared. And after a few days, Cicada 3301 made its last official apparition They posted a message on that Reddit, that had all the story of King Arthur "Hello.

We have found the individuals we sought Thus, our month-long journey ends here. For now. Thank you for your dedication and effort.

If you were unable to complete the test or did not receive an email, do not despair. There will be more opportunities like this one. Thank you all.

3301. P. S.

-a bunch of numbers. " And after that, the silence. Some other messages from Cicada 3301 appeared in 2012, but none of them had the official Cicada signature.

So, they were fake. A few months passed and people just forgot about Cicada 3301. And they continued to live their lives normally.

Until 2013. Exactly one year later, on the same day of the first post in 2012. They came back.

(Hello, again. ) Thank you all for watching up to here, I hope to see you in the next parts of my Cicada 3301 series. Deciphering the next years and what the organization really is in the end.

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Thanks!