[ARG] The Pizza Code Mystery

Black Mesa Archive The Cafeteria
#1581

Well, the hex code may not actually be encoded via a cipher, so it’s completely possible that someone thinking outside the box could solve it.

#1582

Even if the puzzle does involve encryption, we can’t rule out the possibility that someone with no knowledge about cryptography may be able to solve it by simply using the right tool(s) and the right key.

There are also unanswered questions about what’s going on in the story and the sequence of events taking place in it. That’s something that everyone can contribute their thoughts and ideas about. For all we know, there may be something in the story that’s crucial in solving the current puzzle.

That’s a good question. To be honest, I don’t even know where to start in answering that question. Everything we know is what is in the clues which you can read about on the wiki. The rest is just a whole lot of interpretations and speculations, I guess.

Perhaps those of us who have spent some time with this could do a better job of collating and summarizing the clues and findings and present them in a format that is more concise and comprehensible. For instance, we could perhaps try and map it all out on a whiteboard, sort of like an investigator’s whiteboard. But I have to admit it would take some work, and who has the time, right?

#1583

The message in the first IRC clue also had OTR markers in it. First the ?OTR,1,3,?OTR: marker, then an OTR: marker immediately preceding the “corrupted” message. In other IRC clues that had an inner code or puzzle, the code was preceded by an [OTR//n.0] tag. I’m wondering if the message in the first IRC clue is supposed to be [OTR//1.0]. If that’s true, then we have four puzzles in the IRC clues, each identified by the corresponding OTR version number.

In IRC Clue 2, there were location clues, one of which led us to the Kryptos sculpture located on the grounds of CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. This sculpture contains a coded message in four parts which people have been trying to decipher for decades. The first three parts have been deciphered, while the fourth is still unsolved. This looks conspicuously like our current situation with the four OTR puzzles, three of which have been solved, while the fourth is yet to be solved.

In the case of the Kryptos enigma, the artist who created the sculpture has said that the answers to the first sections contain clues to the last section. Perhaps this is something that applies to the The Pizza Code Mystery as well.

  • As far as I can tell, that texture is only ever used in Dr. Horn’s shack (a.k.a. the taco shack). And why is it invisible in the game? Is it a bug, or was it made invisible on purpose?

  • Also, the airfield shown on the top photo is not HAFB. I checked in Google Earth. I have no idea which airfield it could be, though.

  • Perhaps the crossed out circles, or circled Xes, are marking out jets or transport vehicles carrying a shipment of Niobium.

  • Another thing, I don’t know if this means anything, but that map in the room, which is also found in Dr. Horn’s office, is full of circled dots.

#1584

From Wikipedia:

“A nazar is a circled-dot-shaped amulet believed to protect against the evil eye”

shrug You never know, I guess. Ties into the whole Satan thing going on.

#1585

Welcome to 10 months, 27 days ago.

#1586

Wow. I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I first posted this thread and this thing still hasn’t been solved yet. That’s insane!

This almost makes me think that Xen will hold the key to said gateway puzzle, but who knows…

#1587

Erm…How similar do the pizza codes look to the statue codes? Maybe they match? :retard:

In all seriousness, though, you may be on to something. But how do we figure out which parts of the previous codes to use, and how?

#1588

Summary: Looks like a dead end to me.

===== Aerial airport photos

That image piqued my interest.

For the larger image, Google image search found two matches, among those
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2006/08/18/google_tibet/
that suggested that it might show an airport in Chengdu, China.
Indeed, it is a heliport in Chengdu, looking military:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=30.730161,104.092537&z=16
I do not see a connection to the ARG.

The lower image is too far covered by the upper one,
image search found no matches. And the resolution is too low to
know for sure what can be seen (tandem-rotor helicopters?).

The image of the propeller plane did not yield a result, either.

===== The aeronautical chart

In the abovementioned post there is another image,
showing a map with an airport diagram tacked onto it:

Applying Google image-based search to the map
( https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26382658/BMSARG/map2.png )
found a page which shows a higher-res version of the map:
https://www.venusvirtual.net/images/CartaAeronautica_Ohio_front.jpg

As the file name indicates, the map is an aeronautical chart
showing the state of Ohio in the USA, with lake Erie at the top.
See here for comparison:
https://skyvector.com/?ll=40.39467254881695,-82.65509033553617&chart=301&zoom=6

The higher-resolution image was found on a virtual airline’s web page:
https://www.venusvirtual.net/vfr_08-cartas-sinmbologia.html
Google did not find any other image like it.

The dots on the map are airports, the circles are probably the boundaries of
the airports’ class E airspaces, which usually have a radius of 5 miles.
https://www.usppa.org/Resources/reading_charts.htm

I feel that the cirles are not relevant, this type of map just has them.
I see no reason to assume that the semiotic (“cultural”) meanings of
“circled dots” are relevant here.
Did a “circled dot” appear anywhere else in the ARG so far?

===== The airport diagram

Regarding the airport diagram tacked onto the map, I cropped and aligned it,
then uploaded that to Google image search, which told me that it shows
https://www.globalsecurity.org/jhtml/jframe.html#https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/images/ellsworth_map.gif|||
which is found on a page about Ellsworth Airforce Base in South Dakota:
https://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/facility/ellsworth.htm
And in full glory:
https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=44.144954,-103.099308&z=14

(An aside: Google found three other hits for the image, all on sites
apparently written in Arabic script. Interesting.
For one of the sites, Google Translate tells me that it’s an
Encyclopedia of the United States Air Force.)

The photos on the other texture do not match Ellsworth AFB.

South Dakota is at least hundreds of miles from both Ohio and “Black Mesa”.
I see no connection to Black Mesa, it may be just a random AFB.

#1589

Dead end or otherwise, this is good stuff! Even if these images were simply taken from Google and tacked on some in-game boards, at least now we have a keener understanding of their origins. Thanks for this :awesome:

EDIT: By the way, Code_ and I had an exchange of messages about this, and he believes it is most likely a block cipher–I concur. It is probably a 128bit or 256bit block cipher with any possible key length / mode. OTR uses AES as its base, so this might be a hint that this is the right direction, seeing as how we’re getting an advancing OTR theme with the IRC clues. Furthermore, this was mentioned before, and Storm did say someone was very close. I think we should (seriously) consider the following ciphers: AES / Rjindael; Serpent, Twofish, Blowfish, etc.

That, of course, still leaves the issue of the key length / what the key is. It is probably not going to be blatantly obvious, but will probably be referenced in some of the clues. Some of this Dante’s Inferno and Satanic stuff seems very over the top, and is potentially a red herring to throw the scent. Perhaps we need to dig deeper into the roots of the ARG, and perhaps attempt some rainbow attacks.

Also, the Satan references may point at Lucifer, which has been mentioned before. Much like the “Victor would like this . . .” clue for Code D, which pointed at the SECOM cipher, this may follow the same trend.

#1590

Mcrypt was mentioned a few pages back, so I decided to investigate that. It offers a few algorithms that are not included in OpenSSL, and undoubtedly are not compatible anyway.

I initially got really excited when I tried to decrypt our mysterious data file and saw this come back:

But my excitement was short lived. It seems any old file you throw at it gets this message, even a normal text file or a dump of /dev/random.

#1591

So instead I made another bash script, much like my previous OpenSSL based one. Like my previous script, this one will iterate over all possible algorithms, digests, and keys. You can check different keys by changing the first declaration in the file. I’ve only checked the ‘benalohpaillier’ related permutations for now, but if anyone else wants to try their luck with other candidates, by all means.

#!/bin/bash
declare -a KEYS=('benalohpaillier' 'BENALOHPAILLIER' 'benaloh paillier' 'BENALOH PAILLIER' 'Benaloh Paillier' 'BenalohPaillier')

declare -a KEYMODES=('asis' 'scrypt' 'mcrypt-md5' 'mcrypt-sha1' 'pkdes' 's2k-simple-md5' 's2k-simple-sha1' 's2k-simple-ripemd' 's2k-salted-md5' 's2k-salted-sha1' 's2k-salted-ripemd' 's2k-isalted-md5' 's2k-isalted-sha1' 's2k-isalted-ripemd')

declare -A ALGORITHMS
ALGORITHMS['cast-128']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['gost']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['rijndael-128']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['twofish']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['arcfour']='stream' 
ALGORITHMS['cast-256']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb' 
ALGORITHMS['loki97']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['rijndael-192']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb' 
ALGORITHMS['saferplus']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['wake']='stream'
ALGORITHMS['blowfish-compat']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['des']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['rijndael-256']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['serpent']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['xtea']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['blowfish']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['enigma']='stream'
ALGORITHMS['rc2']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'
ALGORITHMS['tripledes']='cbc cfb ctr ecb ncfb nofb ofb'

IN=$(cat $1)
OUT="/tmp/tmp.halosoutput"

for k in "${KEYS[@]}"
do
	for a in "${!ALGORITHMS[@]}"
	do
		for m in ${ALGORITHMS[$a][@]}
		do
			for o in "${KEYMODES[@]}"
			do
				echo $IN | mcrypt --decrypt --bare --quiet --key "$k" --algorithm $a --mode $m --keymode $o > $OUT 2> /dev/null
				result=$(file $OUT)
				result=${result:22}
				if [ '$result' != 'data' ] && [ '$result' != 'empty' ]; then
					echo "======================================================"
					echo "== Algorithm: $a-$m     Key: \"$k\"    KeyMode: $o"
					echo "== FileType: $result"
					cat $OUT
					echo ""
					echo ""
				fi
			done
		done
	done
done

chmod +x decrypt.sh
./decrypt.sh halos.raw > results.txt

All interesting results will be sent to STDOUT, so it works best to pipe it to a file and look at it in a text editor. The unix ‘file’ program is used to flag something as interesting, but it still requires a bit of human effort to see if anything is actually interesting.
decrypt.sh.txt (1.97 KB)
halos.raw.txt (376 Bytes)

#1592

A friend suggested maybe converting the Hex to Assembly language and seeing if it meant anything. Looks like a lot of work.

#1593

Okay guys, I have no idea if this is even relevant, but open multiple tabs of various BM forums pages. And click between them, while looking really hard at the logo pic (Chrome).

There’s something there, changing color. No idea if this is related to the puzzle at all, just thought I’d share.

#1594

https://forums.blackmesasource.com/img/page_logo.png
I see nothing.

#1595

I think it’s just the background as it changes.
Of course, I’m using firefox, but if it was part of the ARG it would have been made for and tested on all browsers.

#1596

Firefox here, no change. I don’t think that is ARG related.

#1597

As U said, this can be a reference to the Airstrike in the desert. Stormseeker had worked in this scene.

#1598

I just got to thinking about the hint again (Tempus omnia revelant = Time reveals all), and there is a clock in the staff canteen which lists the time as 9:03:00

Are there any ciphers that would take a time as an input?

#1599

I’m not sure if the clock in the canteen reading 9:03 is relevant to any ARG. Remember, Gordon is on the tram at 8:47 AM and by the time you get to the canteen, it could be 9:03.

#1600

9.03 is probably the time when the cascade hit and the clock stopped.

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