[ARG] The Pizza Code Mystery

[AngelSG]

@Gunsrequiem

EDIT: Just as a side note, I remember in the beginning of the ARG when the IRC channel was highly populated that Code/Storm mentioned something that stuck with me. He noted another ARG in another game that was left unsolved (I think) and had some ridiculously meticulous puzzles. For instance, he said that in one level cockroaches on the ground ran in a pattern, and unless you knew how to note the pattern and then decode the pattern to produce letters, it was nigh impossible to figure out. With that said, and with what we know about how intricate and precise Storm’s clues and work with the game have been, I think we may be in for a considerable challenge. The man has a history with this kind of stuff, so hold on to your hats

Let’s hope that doesn’t need to be done, we’re having enough trouble as it is. He was probably talking about the ARG he mentioned as 0418 in this thread, Torment by greengecko. Sadly, if he took inspiration from it, as it seems since that ARG also gave the coordinates of the kryptos statue, we will never know, it was deleted in 2011 because some players hacked the email account of the creator. The only thing I could found was a puzzle trail in the unfiction forums where stormseeker had made some comments.

If he used a block cipher, he probably used OpenSSL (maybe I’m wrong, but I think is by far the most used encryption software, thats why the heartbleed bug that everyone talks about is such a problem). I’ve been thinking about using a salt, since our previous attemps to decode it did not work, and if he wanted to change the size of the ciphertext so it looked like the block size was 64 bits, this is a possibility. OpenSSL keeps the salt padded to the ciphertext in HEX like this

Salted__[Here_be_salt][Here_be_ciphertext]

If he wanted to obfuscate the block size, since the salt by default is 8 bytes long in OpenSSL, and "Salted__ "is also 8 bytes long, by deleting “Salted__”, the ciphertext of a 128 bits block size cipher, would go from being a multiple of 128bits, to multiple of 64bits. Thus, by adding Salted__ at the start of the HalosCode, block ciphers with a block size of 128 bits, like AES, could be used with non-stream modes, like cbc and ecb, to decrypt the code.

Edit: Apparently, there is another Black Mesa arg:
https://trevorbrennan.com/dev/bmrf/about.php
If you look at the source code, it is stated that it is based on half-life and portal, by Valve. You will also find in a comment part 1 of 4 of a message, It decodes to “Simulation data for spe” also, you can see the exact same ascii art lambda than in the source code of bmrf.us. Also(too many also’s),the start of the source code is equal to the one in terminal.bmrf.us.

So… bmrf.us is not even a redherring, somebody else is making webpages about another Black Mesa ARG.

https://trevorbrennan.com/bmiarg.html

Still, why bmrf.us has a DALsys login? Wasn’t that supossed to be the signature of one of the BM developers?

From the wiki, added by flavrans9:
“DALsys/DALsystems is the claimed signature from a modeler/texture artist on the BM development team, Brian Dale (a.k.a. bkdale86), as he revealed in a thread he made in the “Developer Updates” section on the forums in early March, 2014.”

So… the question now is… is the Black Mesa Incident ARG related to the Pizza Code Mistery ARG?

[Gunsrequiem]

Christ . . . so many possibilities.

I quit.

[PsYxOpAt]

This is a standard declaration for all websites. It’s not ARG related. However at the bottom of the page there is a comment

Also, there is a

tag with display: none property with 4 images inside. Maybe you guys should try to decode them?

[P_PORTAL_RTAL]

oO…

omg indeed we are finding new stuff, bug god knows where it leads

[P_PORTAL_RTAL]

now i would expect combination of 8 bytes but that doesnt compute

01010011
01101001
01101101
01110101
01101100
01100001 

01110100
01101001
01101111
01101110
00100000
01100100
01 

10000101
11010001
10000100
10000001
10011001
10111101
11

00100010
00000111
00110111
00000110
01010110
00

[faed]

Sorry to burst your bubble but this is old.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Forum:Half-Life_ARG

[AngelSG]

@faed

Sorry to burst your bubble but this is old.

https://combineoverwiki.net/wiki/Forum:Half-Life_ARG

Thanks god. So, if bmrf.us is not related to that ARG, we should assume that it is related to this one.

[1942rob]

What if the 752 code is not encrypted, but compressed data (without a header); given the right compression-algorithm the entropy would still be pretty high right? If so could we deduce what header/algorithm would be needed to decompress it?

This could fit with the whole “How do you know solving this has anything to do with encryption?” thingy.

[AngelSG]

@1942rob

What if the 752 code is not encrypted, but compressed data (without a header); given the right compression-algorithm the entropy would still be pretty high right? If so could we deduce what header/algorithm would be needed to decompress it?

This could fit with the whole “How do you know solving this has anything to do with encryption?” thingy.

I had the same idea some time ago. I tried to make some statistical analysis with some software I found, but the Code was too short for the software to differentiate wheter it was encrypted data or compresed data. But still, is a possibility, compressed data does have a high entropy.

EDIT:

As it happens, I was reading an article about essoteric programming languages(as every sane person does) and there is an esoteric programming language, which was dessigned to not being useful to the point that it was completely unusable, but due to some errors on the design it is usable. The name “Malboge”, the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge

It was used in elementary, Season 1 Episode 10, it aired 13/12/2012, so it would be difficult that stormseeker took the idea from there, anyway, I’m watching the episode just in case. This language is pretty obscure, uses a ternary number base.

There’s also Nimrod, which is also a programming lenguage, apart from a demon on Dante’s book. If this is not it, then I don’t know what else to do.

Edit2:
On this page you can compile code, but it seems that nimrod has to be compiled through C or C++, to generate the executable in Nimrod language, I’ll look into it.

https://www.compileonline.com/

Edit3:
Ok, Nimrod doesn’t seem to be a candidate, its code looks orderly, not random.

Edit4: I give up, I don’t know how to use the code with the online compiler. The most difficult piece of software made with the language is hello world and the like, so the output of a code should be a relatively small phrase.

[Toxyn]

whenever i come across a puzzle in a zelda game and it ends up taking a few days to solve, the answer is usually something really simple and maybe a bit obvious

[Gunsrequiem]

@toxyn

whenever i come across a puzzle in a zelda game and it ends up taking a few days to solve, the answer is usually something really simple and maybe a bit obvious

To be honest, nothing in a Zelda game should take a few days to solve. A few minutes maybe, but none of the puzzles in any of those games even equates to the difficulty of this ARG. Probably not even if their difficulties were combined.

[Toxyn]

They do have the occasional toughie especially when the game is new. I’m not usually grinding my gears the entire few days I just spend an hour or so each day trying to figure out what I’m missing. My point was that perhaps the answer is simple or easily overlooked.

[Gunsrequiem]

@toxyn

They do have the occasional toughie especially when the game is new. I’m not usually grinding my gears the entire few days I just spend an hour or so each day trying to figure out what I’m missing. My point was that perhaps the answer is simple or easily overlooked.

Hmmm . . . you make a good point. It may be extremely simple, yet the possibility of red herrings and false paths makes it very difficult to know if we’re even on the right track. Perhaps someone will have a revelation at some point, and it will turn out to be a very simple solution.

[AngelSG]

I would say there’s a difference, Zelda games always have relatively obvious solutions, that’s why most of the time you find the solution easily, or, if it takes some time, it ends being something obvious. Besides, what does qualify as obvious with this puzzle? A 64bit block size simmetric cipher? Maybe it ends up being something painfuly obvious, but with the amount of redherrings, as Guns says, it’s even difficult to know if we are in the right track, it’s even difficult to tell if there is a track at all, maybe we are supposed to make a big leap to solve this.

EDIT: You know what? Let’s try something really simple… Is the answer 42?

[Gunsrequiem]

@AngelSG

Is the answer 42?

I’ve been wondering this myself.

[Toxyn]

Pizza looks like clock.

The Pizza Code Mystery

Replace pizza with the word “time”

The Time Code Mystery!

durka.

I actually went into the game to see if there would be a clock in each chapter. “We’ve got hostiles” I couldn’t find a clock there so I gave up.

also, in that chapter with the rocket launch, you could stand in the centre of that hologram of the world, it shows three satellites. Answer is all around you?

[Gunsrequiem]

@toxyn

Pizza looks like clock.

The Pizza Code Mystery

Replace pizza with the word “time”

The Time Code Mystery!

durka.

I actually went into the game to see if there would be a clock in each chapter. “We’ve got hostiles” I couldn’t find a clock there so I gave up.

also, in that chapter with the rocket launch, you could stand in the centre of that hologram of the world, it shows three satellites. Answer is all around you?

Share your drugs with me.

[AngelSG]

@toxyn

also, in that chapter with the rocket launch, you could stand in the centre of that hologram of the world, it shows three satellites. Answer is all around you?

Did stormseeker said “The answer is all around you”? I know he said “It’s everywhere you look” on the message where SECOM was spelled by the capital letters, when people was trying to solve the code D. Where did he said that? That message might hold a clue.

On the satellites… Well, the only thing that comes to mind are GPS satellites, they have a clock and they sent a signal with the time, so the GPS device knows how much time it took the signal to reach it. It’s more complicated than that, relativity has to be taken into account due to the speed at which the satellites move.

[Toxyn]

I could have sworn I seen the “answer is all around you” just after “its everywhere you look” a few dozen pages or so back, give or take a few dozen.

I just smoked a fat doobie and gonna go get a pizza and mull things over with my one-dimensional thinking. Its not delivery either.

[AngelSG]

@toxyn

I know this is gonna sound extremely stupid, but I was watching Hunger Games: Catching Fire and I realized the arena they were having the Games in was supposed to look like a clock but it was divided into pieces like a pizza.

Edit: Time Reveals all. Do you suppose the clocks displayed throughout black mesa hold the answer? when the answers are all around you.

Well, keep smoking that and maybe just by looking at the code your brain will decode it by itself, because it was you who said that