TrailHeist Solutions

Thought we left you hanging without the solutions to our brain battle? Well think again folks, because here we are with the keys to every question that had you stumped (and then some) because TrailHeist, presented by CITTIC and MAKEATON, does not disappoint!

If you’re here, you’re probably familiar with the structure of our game. Three tracks of varying difficulty were laid out, each of which had a different scoring scheme. Although each question got you different points, completing any track would get you 210 points.

Track A

A1 — LUCID

The dot pattern below was placed in the story.

The key was hiding in plain sight as the dots are Braille Symbols. Either dive in with a Braille Symbol chart and convert the pattern manually or use an online Braille to text converter to end up with the key — ‘Dont Panic’. We hope you didn’t panic (much)!

Key: th{Dont Panic}

A2 — MARQUEE

Marquee gave you a downloadable text file and not much else in the way of clues because we are still in easy question territory here, folks.

While it looks at first glance like a mammoth task lay ahead, the actual solution was pretty simple. A mere three steps gets you the key.

1. All the words had to be changed into numbers and numerical operators. A task better left to the ‘Find and Replace’ tool on notepad.
2. The string would now need to be evaluated with the BODMAS rule in mind or better yet, paste the string into the google search bar to get the answer.
3. The last step was to get rid of the decimal part to get the key.

Key :- th{3929792}

A3 — THE CUBES

The Cubes dropped you off with a video of words flashing on the screen and a the elusive words ‘The key lies in the cubes’. Here’s the video in case you wanted a peek:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SXtfolRys

1. The 100 words flashing through the video needed to be tracked down. This could be done either by slowing it down or with an online video to image converter.
2. The next task was to figure out which of these words mattered and which did not. That is where our little hint comes in. ‘The key is in the cubes’ — meaning only those words which were 1st, 8th, 27th and 64th were to be counted.

And sure enough, that will get you the words, ‘The God of Thunder’ leading you straight to the key.

Key: th{THOR}.

A4 — INTERSTELLAR

Here’s the stream of binaries, or like the story said at that point — ‘A star winking at you’ — trippy, you say? Well, we thought so too.

00101110000101101101111010000110011101100010011001001110111101101011011010100110001001101000011010111110

All there is to do is reverse every eight bits of the stream its corresponding ASCII values. All there would be left to do is concatenate them and you’re left with the Flag!

The flag is th{andromeda}

A5 — TICKING LIBRARY

And here it is! Ticking library! The question that stumped many an enthusiastic coder and stopped them dead in their tracks.

The question begins in a room full of books and clocks. It is also explained that of the 7 clocks, only the first one shows the right time.

Clock 1 : 06:41:18

Clock 2 : 12:37:11

Clock 3 : 05:49:27

Clock 4 : 16:32:09

Clock 5 : 12:01:11

Clock 6 : 14:10:38

Clock 7 : 07:33:20

The player is also left with another elusive clue here-

In the tale of the claustrophobe and the engineer who would ally with Thanos, lies a key so well hidden, that unless you seek when the clock strikes triple ten, you will find but zilch.

And of course, a well stocked little library :

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1frOmpwTM1ii8Mm-4JynS3h-nnn39kKNR?usp=sharing

1. The beginning point is the first clock. As said in the clue, it needs to hit triple ten, that is, 10:10:10. That would change all the other six clocks to a different time too, leaving you with 7 times in the format XX:YY:ZZ
2. The claustrophobe in the clue is hinting at Robert Langdon while the engineer that would team with Thanos is Betrand Zobrist who are both characters in Inferno.
3. Armed with a book and a series of numbers, a cipher of some sort is in play. We used an Ottendorf (Book Cipher) in this case. So, every XX indicated a page number, a YY indicated a line number and ZZ indicated the letter number. The seven clocks would lead you to seven letters that would join to form the key.

A moment of silence to every dedicated participant that speed read Dan Brown’s Inferno in that time.

Key: th{TRIGGER}

A6 — THE FINAL PROBLEM

The Final Problem, in this track was placed in a zip file. If you made it this far on your own, you should probably cheer for yourself because we sure did!

enterprise.zip

The encryption we had used here was a simple XOR operation, though its contents — input.txt and output.txt needed some conversions.

1. The first step was to read the input.txt and output.txt in byte form and then base 64 encode the input.txt bytes.
2. Next, the hex bytes of the output.txt are to be decoded
3. Then you have to XOR the first 32 bytes of the two values above.
4. Convert that result into ASCII and there you have it! The flag.

You can also guess these steps for decryption by reverse engineering encryption.py

Key: th{only the dead have seen war!}

Track B

B1 — MOZART

We started you off on Track B, paying homage to Mozart, and giving you the number 29898 (which just so happens to be the birthday of both our writers!) and you had to find the smallest number of steps to make the number reach zero while only dividing by 10 and subtracting 1 from the number.

One way to do this would be to grab a pen and get down to solving this manually. The trick is to subtract by one until you get to a number divisible by ten. Then divide by ten at that point and so on. Count the total number of operations until zero and there we have it, the key.

Of course, then there is the smart way of doing it, which would be knowing that the number of operations to get the figure to zero would equal — (number of digits) — 1 + (sum of digits)

Key: th{forty}

B2 — UKULELE

Ukulele took us on a walk down memory lane with the “I love you” song from the show Barney and kids. Here’s our version played on a piano:-

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LeA70pRlEed-s6VbSNrZE3WENut74fdu?usp=sharing

For everyone that recognised the Barney song, all there was to do was to google the notes to that tune and you’d have your key. And even if you didn’t, our story did give you a whacky transformer phone that only had the letters A,B, C, D, E and F with which to enter an answer, all of which pointed to music notes.

Love that we peppered little hints for you in the story? You’re welcome!

An alternative way would be to use an online music to musical notes converter or a mobile App that would do the same.

Key: th{GEGGEGAGFEDEF}

B3 — SCHUBERT

If you think that the question under Schubert was tough to solve, well, let us tell you that it was just as tricky to frame.

1. There are 5 patients occupying 5 hospital beds in an isolation ward.
2. In each bed lies a patient with a different occupation.
3. These five patients use a certain type of laptop, a certain brand of mobile, have a certain disease and take a certain medicine.
4. No two patients have the same laptop, mobile, disease or use the same medicine.

Find the medicine taken by the patient who is lying to the right of the one who is most likely to die.

1. The patient who uses a Predator has Dengue.
2. The patient who uses ThinkPad takes Aciclovir.
3. The patient who uses a ChromeBook also uses a Pixel.
4. The patient who has Malaria is exactly to the left of the one who has Chickenpox.
5. The one with Malaria uses an iPhone.
6. The lawyer takes Amoxicillin.
7. The Engineer has Influenza.
8. The one in the middle uses a OnePlus.
9. The patient who uses a MacBook is on the first bed.
10. The doctor lies next to the one who takes Baloxavir.
11. The one who takes Streptomycin lies next to the engineer.
12. The student uses an Xperia.
13. The Journalist uses a SurfacePro.
14. The one who uses a MacBook lies next to the one who has the Plague.
15. The doctor lies next to the patient who uses a Galaxy.

You have to begin by solving our version of ‘Einstein’s puzzle’.

Google searching each disease and medicine would get you to the obvious conclusion that the patient on the third bed is taking the wrong medicine for Dengue (an antibiotic for a viral disease). Thus, with all else in optimum condition, this patient would be more likely to succumb to their disease.

The patient lying to their right has Malaria. The most widely used medicine for Malaria is ‘Chloroquine’, which is the key.

Key: th{chloroquine}

B4 — IVES

The question under Ives starts you off with this image -

1. The first task here is to resize the image. Since there are 98 squares in a row, it should be resized into a 98 by 98 pixel image.
2. Each black pixel represents a zero and every white pixel a one.
3. Every eight bits would make an ASCII character and get you this message -

If at this moment, I told you that there is a genetically born mutation that threatens our very existence and that all my organisation and I worked for is to save the human race from it, you might not believe me. Truth is, there is a lot about your reality that is an extremely well crafted story, far from the truth. A terrible mutation threatens our very existence. This mutation has made its carriers hypersensitive to some types of musical arrangements. It makes them hallucinate.

Scientists all over the world gave up because they had forgotten what was really important. Survival! What use is ethics and an honour code in an empty world devoid of life? But nothing stopped us, we went ahead and altered the human genome. And you are the only one of the batch that survived to this developmental stage.

All this is what we did to save the human race. We put all ethical questions aside because at the end of the day, that is what matters, the survival of the human race. The reason you and I are here at this point in time and space and even the reason behind some of our deeper seated instincts is all the primal need to survive. And like Darwin said, it is the th{ — -} of the fittest. xoxo

Key: th{survival}

B5 — CHOPIN

Chopin is the last question on this track, so you know we put all our efforts into making this quite a tricky question. So, fair warning, there’s plenty of twists and turns coming up ahead. But if you made it this far, it would not be too much of a task.

As per usual, we did leave you a clue, which we agree was chock full of words from a thesaurus!

‘On a chart of the occident you must,

Ink out a path through every picture that adorns the walls.

Follow the turns of your strokes;

May the tunes of the son of a muse guide your plot’

Weblink :- https://akuls.com/imageSort/

This weblink leads you to a couple of images, each of which generated a string when clicked on. The task was to figure out the order in which these images were to be clicked to generate the right string.

1. The first step would be figuring out the locations that the images point to. Google lens or google image search would come in handy here.
2. The next step would be to plot these locations on the map as pointed out by the first two lines in our clue that ask you to plot all of those points on a map of the West. Zooming in on Europe, this is roughly what you would see on the map if you identify all the images and plot right.

If you’ve been wondering why all the chapter names thus far have been names of famous composers through history or musical instruments, it was to get you to join the dots to form the word ‘music’! If that did not ring a bell, there was of course our clue, which asked you to follow the ‘tunes’ of the son of a muse. If you’ve an eye for detail, you would also have noticed that the first letters of all the chapters in this track put together spell out ‘music’ too.

If you ask me, that is way too many hints!

All that’s left now is follow the strokes and click on the pictures in the same order and you have your key.

Key: th{*7;~|_kn€w_1t_w@$_0nLy=@_m@t:t£r_0f__t!mE._w€lL~d0n£!*&H%!~qwsdfv˳ƒ˜+:ˍð¸ˇ©ˍ}

Track C

C1 — THE CRAZY CALL

We started you on track C with an array of numbers. The key is the smallest number such that when it is divided by a number from the array, it leaves a remainder one less than the number it is divided by.

Array: [17, 11, 5, 10, 22]

X % 17 = 16

X % 11 = 10

X % 5 = 4

X % 10 = 9

X % 22 = 21

The solution is to find the LCM of the figures and subtract one from it to hit on the key.

Key: th{one eight six nine}

C2 — RED WAVE

A hex string was given to the player-

2c2c2c2c202c2c2c3d3d202c3d2c202c2c2c3d3d203d2c2c2c2c3d202c3d3d3d3d202c2c2c2c2c203d2c2c2c2c3d203d2c3d3d203d3d3d3d3d202c2c3d202c3d2c203d2c2c2c2c3d203d2c2c2c202c2c2c3d3d202c2c2c2c3d202c2c3d203d3d2c2c2c202c3d3d3d3d202c2c3d2c202c2c3d202c3d2c2c203d2c2c2c2c3d202c2c3d2c202c3d2c2c202c2c2c2c3d203d3d2c

The ASCII equivalent of this string gives the following:

,,,, ,,,== ,=, ,,,== =,,,,= ,==== ,,,,, =,,,,= =,== ===== ,,= ,=, =,,,,= =,,, ,,,== ,,,,= ,,= ==,,, ,==== ,,=, ,,= ,=,, =,,,,= ,,=, ,=,, ,,,,= ==,

On replacing the commas with dots and the equality symbols with dashes, the following morse code is arrived at:

…. … — .-. … — -….- . — — ….. -….- -. — — — — ..- .-. -….- -… … — ….- ..- — … . — — ..-. ..- .-.. -….- ..-. .-.. ….- — .

All that remains is to translate the morse code to arrive at the key.

Key: th{H3R3–15-Y0UR-B34U71FUL-FL4G}

C3 — RECRUITED

An image and a RAR file were given for download. The RAR file is password protected.

We also left you with a little hint for this question:

Talk to Caesar for the first ticket.

Travel around the world.

Dig till you find the door.

The key belongs to virtual vagabonds.

Files:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1fLDXsAjpS2z-tE7WnA2Jgv3DB4xgafyB?usp=sharing

The image consisted of the letters ‘rshqvhvdph’. A Caesar cipher had to be used to decode them. Shift the letters around to get ‘opensesame’ as the decoded text. An online decoder can be used for this or trial and error would let you know that the shift is three letters backwards.

1. ‘Opensesame’ is the password to the protected RAR file.
2. The ‘dig’ files inside it are all images. Every ‘dig’ file says ‘WRONG PLACE’ except for the one inside the folder ‘Germany’. Open the ‘dig’ file in it to find a server address ‘http://159.89.164.154/'.
3. Go to the address using your browser. You must use a VPN (Virtual vagabond). Choose Germany as VPN location to find the key ‘Alohomora’ on the webpage. Every other request location other than Germany would return a GIF file that would tell you that you were wrong.

Key: th{Alohomora}.

C4 — FINAL DECISION

The final question of Track C leaves you an image file and of course, kudos from our team for having made it this far!

ZImage.jpeg

The image file given contains a hidden zipped pdf file. Renaming the file to .zip or .rar extension would help you extract this pdf.

The key is hex encoded and split into two. The first part of the key is repeatedly base64 encoded 5 times and stored at the bottom of the pdf file.

On base64 decoding 5 times, we get the hex value 74687b50346e44656d3143

Converting this hex value to ASCII, we get the string th{P4nDem1C, which is the first part of the flag. The second part is repeatedly ASCII85 encoded 5 times and stored inside the metadata of the image file as the artist’s name.

Upon ASCII85 decoding 5 times, we get the hex value 5f3075375f627265346b7d

On converting this hex value to ASCII, we get the string _0u7_bre4k} , which is the second part of the key.

Key: th{P4nDem1C_0u7_bre4k}

At this point, you’re either punching yourself for having come really close to the solution or you wanna punch all of us for having made sure we threw you off the trail now and again.

Here’s a collection of program codes for those questions that needed a little something extra to crack: https://github.com/Make-a-Ton/th-2020 . So don’t forget to head over there and check those out too.

But we know that its your love for cracking and coding that keeps you hooked and not a scoreboard. And if this game gave your mind a brief escape from the chaos around, we tag that a win.

Last but not the least, we want to express our profound appreciation for our special li’l cookies who were stuck on ‘Starting Out’ for a solid hour or two. In case you were wondering, the key was ‘th{welcome to TrailHeist}’.

If you liked the little tidbits of behind the scenes moments in this article, wait till you get a look next week’s article which is basically one big blooper reel.

Until then, folks!