Top Badge Silk
nonpareil bimil: Icnwc lsrbcx kc ntr-yudnv ifz xdgm yduxnw yc iisto-eypzk
nonpareil- French ‘without equal’; bimil – romanization of Korean ‘secret’.
A secret without equal, huh? Let’s file away that OTP ciphertext for later.
Middle Silk
10000100001 ΣA120215
First part is clear – this is 1o57’s stamp that he likes to pepper liberally throughout the puzzle, converts directly from binary.
Second part is somewhat trickier, at first it appears to be a date. It’s obviously not the date of manufacture, just because we heard about delivery problems from 1o57 on twitter just a week or so before the con (Thanks everyone who works on that – I can’t imagine the sort of scaling and production issues for these things). It could be a design date, but it’s not as though 1o57 has filed a copyright.
In fact, not a date at all – A120215 is the code for a documented integer sequence. A quick lookup ( online encyclopedia of integer sequences) gives that full integer sequence:
1057, 7503, 3059, 9505, 5061, 1607, 7063, 3609, 9065, 5611, 1167, 7613, 3169, 9615, 5171, 1717, 7173, 3719, 9175, 5721, 1277, 7723, 3279, 9725, 5281, 1827, 7283, 3829, 9285, 5831, 1387, 7833, 3389, 9835, 5391, 1937, 7393, 3939, 9395, 5941, 1497, 7943, 3499, 9945, 5501
Anyone who’s studied early university level math will recognize the capital sigma as a summation sign, so summing the integers gives 247545.
lostboy.net/247545
gives us a first flag (or “Access Fragment Vector”).
Designer speculation:
I think it’s a fun exercise to not just think about these puzzles ‘forward’ ie how we solve them, but also ‘backwards’ i.e. how 1o57 put them together. This is all speculation, because 1o57 hasn’t told us any of this stuff. It’s all about identifying the free choices to be made – 1o57 is good, but he can’t change the structure of, e.g. the English language to fit his puzzles.
So, the same online integer resource is searchable. He did apparently want 1057 to be prominently apparent in the sequence, which makes a desired sequence rarer. Even so, the sequences are pretty densely available. Let’s do a different one. Say we wanted our hidden sequence to be 1337. With a search at ( online encyclopedia of integer sequences), we get just one choice:
A237476
So, we could make our own 1337 version of this.
Bottom Badge Silk
There were a lot of these, and they were all encoded with rot2, unusually enough.
Human: 010625110310031312 = CHAMELEON Goon: 032203011918071312 = EXECUTION Artist: 02191718 = DUST Vendor: 182113 = TWO Contest: 110712072518191603 = MINIATURE Speaker: 1718030310 = STEEL CFP(?): 171825180701 = STATIC Press: 11191803 = MUTE
All of these are lostboy pages:
lostboy.net/Chameleon
lostboy.net/Execution
lostboy.net/Dust
lostboy.net/Two
lostboy.net/Miniature
lostboy.net/Steel
lostboy.net/Static
lostboy.net/Mute
More importantly, they are all Twilight Zone episodes
lostboy.net/TwilightZone
Degenerate Metric 