PreCipherSaga is a prelude to the cryptic hunt event being held during EPITOME'24, the annual tech fest of Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya, Vadodara.
Cryptic hunts are like treasure hunts, but online. They require you to hunt the internet for clues and hints to solve given questions. Cipher coders, AI tools, QR codes, coding softwares, etc. are all allowed and to be used.
The person to solve most levels by the end of the competition wins. In case of a tie, winners are judged based on the time. Early to solve wins.
- Make sure you have registered on the platform. Make sure only to use your registered student email; all other accounts will be marked as non-compete & you will not be allowed to score any points.
- All hints & lead confirmations will be done via the official PreCipherSaga WhatsApp Group and official TechnoCrats Instagram page only.
- You are not allowed to contact the organizers or any other member for hints or leads. Pressurizing other players or the organizers for leaking answers can be considered as indisciplinary action.
- Sharing answers or hints is strictly prohibited among users via any medium. Only organizers hold this right. If found will lead to direct disqualification.
- To report misconduct by any player, please DM the event coordinators.
- Reverse engineering the platform means direct ban from the competition. Bugs if found should be reported and not exploited. Exploiting a bug also leads to disqualification.
- Decision by organizers is final and should not be questioned.
Cryptic hunts generally revolve around tech, trivia, pop culture, and mostly anything you can find on the internet. Googling is allowed and heavily encouraged, but it won't directly get you the answer in most cases. Think logically, make connections between different parts of levels. Make sure you check the source of the webpage for any hints hidden there. Cryptic hunts are all about connecting the dots and finding the solutions.
Keep getting your leads confirmed from the organizers. If you think you've gotten stuck somewhere, ask for personal/public hints. Lead confirmations are short yes or no confirmations that can be asked from event moderators, to confirm whether you're on the right path while solving the question. You can regularly ask the moderators for confirmations that you're progressing correctly and applying the right logic while solving the level.
The levels will basically consist of a set of clues, all which link to ONE ANSWER related to the world of tech. The difficulty increases with each level. Level 0 will have a relatively simpler answer than the rest of them which you can usually solve in under 10 minutes. Level 1 would be more difficult than level 0, Level 2 would be more difficult than 1, and so on.
When you get two or more clues, try to connect them and find an interrelated clue from it. If it looks like a completely random string, try appending it to the end of common URL patterns, like bit.ly/string, youtube.com/watch?v=string etc. This is known as a backlink. For eg: you get harrywilson as a clue, you can use the clue as a backlink on the hunt's site.
You will usually find clues in the following places (Look for them carefully, and try discovering more yourself):
The hunt's site: Clues are sometimes hidden in the hunt's rules and maybe even in the event descriptions. If you get a blank document as a clue try using ctrita as most of the hunts hide the clue by camouflaging it. The page title. The URL. Focus on every word carefully as almost every hunt uses a lot of wordplay.
The source code: Look at the comments (things written under <!--...>). There could be other links inside the code. (This especially helps in cases in which there aren't any on-screen clues.) You can even try using Inspect Element. (Ctrl+Shift+|) You can also try using View Page Source. (Ctrl+Shift+U) Editing the source code and the URL - In many cases, in relatively more difficult levels, sometimes the submit button is hidden. You may even get a 404 error when you enter the level's URL. In that case, you may have to enter another URL / play with the source code a bit to crack this.
Audio Files: Name of the audio file can be very helpful. Duration of the file and the audio content itself is useful. Text/images in the spectrogram of the audio can give clues. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the loudness of the frequencies in the audio. Locked files within the audio file can be present. Beeps or clicks are common in audio files and usually represent morse or binary code. Changing the tempo and/or the speed of the audio may also be helpful to get clues. Changing the format may also prove to be helpful as some formats may be easier to modify and play around with. Some Common audio tools are Audacity, Sonic Visualizer, Deep sound, Shazam and other online sites.
Videos/GIFs: The content of the file itself may be useful. There could be a visual representation of morse/binary code, example - blinking lights. The audio may need to be extracted/be the only relevant part. Sometimes, only some of the frames are relevant; you may need to pause/slow down the video or split its frames into images. Speeding up the video might be useful as well.
Images: Name of the image file can be very helpful. Dimensions of the image can provide hints. Strings can be hidden in the metadata of the images. Steganography is frequently used. Steganography is a technique of hiding information within another image, invisible to the naked eye to avoid detection. Changing contrast, color schemes, brightness etc.can also help. Headers or the file type may have issues, correcting/changing them is a common technique. Online tools like aperisolve can be used along.
Backlinks: Backlinks are very important aspects of hunts and are also almost always used in hunts. For images, the most famous backlink site is imgur.com pastebin.com is also a very famous backlink site, it is used for storing clues. Sometimes, the pastebin can be password encrypted, in that case, we need to find a clue that fits the password. bit.ly is a famous URL shortener used along withtinyurl.com (which can have a name as a backlink) Another used backlink site is imgflip.com If you are not able to figure out which site the backlink belongs to, you can always go to a backlink identifier such as a4x.me. Sometimes the backlinks are also encrypted.