As the dust slowly settles on the surface of our #rabbit-hole channel we would like to remind you of the previous puzzle that we hosted there.
Our pilots of the Fleet Elite have worked day and night to find the solution, and miraculously did so in the final hours before the puzzle expired.
We want to use this opportunity to congratulate to:
- Ayrton
- FriedrichF
- LeakZ
- Lollo
- MickyVanMouse
- OAscout25
- Skylumaca
- Swaggelwander
- Trill
- Uberg33k
These 10 discord members have passed through the CURL wormhole and will forever remain Twisted.
For those who missed the puzzle for any reason or did not have time to participate, grab a snack and follow us through the wormhole, as we show you the steps that were necessary to come towards the solution.
The faint signal..
The FleetElite has been introduced to the puzzle by the following message:
Transmission received…
A faint signal being broadcasted on all frequencies
One of our FleetElite sounds distressed
All pilots deploy to space, you are our only hope
The first 10 pilots to solve this mystery will be rewarded!
Fall down the #rabbit-hole on discord
Followed by the picture…
The picture itself held some of the clues that were supposed to guide our Pilots towards the solution, but their hands were tied at this point, as the new clue was coming…
Let’s play a game!
After a while puzzle solvers were left without anything to analyze and the atmosphere in the rabbit-hole started heating up. At this point they were teased with another image in the chat:
Our pilots knowing the format of the previous puzzles didn’t take long to conclude that this is supposed to be used as a command (!iwanttoplayagame) to unlock the #lets-play-a-game channel in our discord server.
Once inside the channel the puzzlers were met with a following link:
https://algodao.fi/16f220a5512b38b2043ede4765227ad6
That led them to the website coded specially for this puzzle…
The Barcode
On closer examination of the web page, on the top and the bottom there can be seen lines. Once the image is downloaded and edited with photo editing software these lines can be assembled into a barcode.
The numerical value that the barcode produces is:
3491537B50E6FFB21E120D975E7754BE
Hamster’s layers
While hovering mouse over the website it is quickly noticed that there are 3 layers of the hamster:
What the solving squad quickly noticed is that the Hamsters helmet is inscribed with AES256, we will return to this in a bit.
The part that was left unnoticed for quite some time is the clue on the black layer of the hamster. Once you edit the image and play around with the contrast, you will be able to see text in the middle of the hamster saying “BytexBlackHole”
The Broken Pixel
The clues were piling up in the #What-we-know-so-far thread that our pilots have created, however something was missing in order to connect the dots…
Every inch of the website was examined with the pin point precision, there was some text hidden but it didn’t make much sense.. The twisted souls have hit the dead end, and it was then when someone noticed..
“Have I gone mad..is this pixel…blinking!?” And just as he noticed, and was about to click on the pixel, it was gone.. “I’m definitely going mad, I should take some time off..” And as he was about to call it a day and shut down the tab with the website there it was again, reappearing in another spot of the website, the blinking disco pixel. The pilot didn’t waste any time, he clicked on it and.. Voilà!
The Hamster started falling through, the background was disappearing, everything was getting bright and just in a few seconds the transition was over (We highly encourage you to go to the website and check the animation yourself, it’s, to say the least, very cool).
On the transformed web page our Twisted Hamster was left with only a media player, that played an ominous sound.
The origin of the sound was quickly determined to be sonified data of the Chandra X-ray Observatory observations of the Perseus galaxy cluster’s black hole.
Linking the disparate
At this point all of the clues necessary to find the solution were on the table, everything left was for those who stuck through the whole ordeal was to connect the dots.
With the new findings of the Black hole sound the “BytexBlackHole” clue was starting to make more sense. What it required the solving squad to do is to download the recording and open it with an audio tool that allows for a sneak peek into the byte content of the file.
The AES256 indicates that the message is to be decrypted using the AES decryption tool; there are multiple of those tools available online.
The message to be decrypted is the integer value of the barcode mentioned above:
3491537B50E6FFB21E120D975E7754BE
The decryption will require a key. We tried to guide our pilots towards the key with the following tweet:
In the most naive way, the first 32 characters, as AES256 uses 32 length keys, in base64 encoding of the Black hole audio, represent a key.
AAAAGGZ0eXBkYXNoAAAAAGlzbzZtcDQx
Once the encrypted message (the barcode) in HEX input format is combined together with the key above, the decrypted plain text value reads !Curldao
With this command you are granted the Twisted title, with access to the locked Curl channel on the AlgoDAO discord server, the title was limited to 10 people, and those who entered the command after the initial 10 did not become Twisted.
Final thoughts
With this breakdown we can let the CURL puzzle rest for eternity, and take a break as we prepare for the next one, which will indeed be way more challenging.
Thank you for sticking through this lengthy article with us. Stay twisted!
Make sure to stay connected with us across our social media channels so you do not miss out on important updates.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/algodao-fi
- Discord: https://discord.gg/algodao
- Telegram group: https://t.me/AlgoDAOCommunity
- Telegram announcements: https://t.me/AlgoDAOAnnouncement
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/AlgoDAO_fi
- Medium: https://medium.com/@AlgoDAO.fi
