![]() The book and more information should be found at the URL above. The hidden message also includes a so called book code, consisting of a number of lines with two digits separated by a colon on each. The hidden message says that we should go to the following URL: Although the challenge have not been required any particularly advanced skills yet, someone has obviously been putting some work into it. Now things are actually getting interesting. Using outguess 0.2 with the -r option immediately reveals the hidden message in the original image: outguess -r 3301.jpg 3301.txt Unfortunately, it seems like stegdetect is only able to detect when the older OutGuess 0.13b has been used and not OutGuess 0.2 (from 2001!). Outguess stegdetect download#Incidentally, OutGuess is also developed by Niels Provos and is available for download from the same site as stegdetect ( ). Note that the message contains the words “out” and “guess” though, which could be a hint that we are actually supposed to use the old OutGuess tool to extract the hidden message. It seems like the challenge is a bit harder than a caesar cipher after all. ![]() The image at the URL above can be seen below: To decipher this, a perl oneliner is enough: echo "lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk" | perl -pne 'chomp ssgex $_.=chr(10)' ) It is probably not a coincidence that Claudius happens to be the 4th Emperor of the Roman Empire, and the shift value happens to be 4, either. In this particular case, this might have been a bit overkill, since we could just as well have manually counted the distance between h and l in the alphabet. ![]() So, let’s compare the ASCII values for the cipher text with the ASCII value of the supposed plaintext to see what the shift value is: perl -e 'print ord("h")-ord("l"),chr(10)' This is quite obviously a shift cipher of some sort (also known as a Caesar cipher), with “lxxt>33″ being the ciphered version of “ A shift cipher replaces each letter in the plaintext with a letter (or in this case, arbitrary ASCII character) with a letter a certain number of positions down the alphabet. TIBERIVS CLAVDIVS CAESAR says "lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]O2ntk" :) So, let’s see what we have: tail -61c 3301.jpg Since my next move would have been to use “strings”, I would have discovered this anyway, but stegdetect was kind enough to tell me directly instead. It did not detect any of the common steganographic schemes, but notified me of 61 appended bytes of ASCII text. ) The result can be seen below: stegdetect 3301.jpg Since stegdetect have not been updated in almost 7 years, I didn’t really get my hopes up that high though, but it is always worth a try. My first thought was that it used steganography to hide a message, and since it was a JPEG image I tried using stegdetect by Niels Provos in case one of the detectable schemes was used. I have always had a hard time resisting a challenge. When I came across it, I didn’t think much of it at first, but still decided to look into it just in case it turned out to be interesting. On January 4th 2012, an image was uploaded to various image boards, possibly originating at the infamous /b/ board at 4chan. ![]() I think this is probably an imposter, rather than the real Cicada, but I got a cryptic message after the article in Daily Telegraph, from someone calling himself Tibiceninae (the name of a cicada subfamily)… Unfortunately I don’t have the time to look into it much deeper myself at the moment, but I have collected my notes on it so far here: More about me, what I do and the services I offer: :) BTC: 1GCzqKpGY7ucfNSTJHo8psdeWP1YPegnz Outguess stegdetect free#If you appreciate my writeups, feel free to send me a donation. Note that the GCHQ challenge is a bit more technical in nature than the Cicada 3301 puzzles, so it might not be for everyone. My solutions for that challenge are available here: GCHQ: solve the online code, become a real-life spy If these kinds of puzzles and challenges interest you, you might also be interested in looking at the old GCHQ challenge: The internet mystery that has the world baffledįor more information about Cicada 3301 and my solutions for the 2012 challenge, keep on reading… Lately there has been a lot of attention about the Cicada 3301 puzzles, and my work on them, after this article: ![]()
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