Well, if it is even going, it’s going badly, one year and some months with apparently no real progress.
Is it against the rules to advertise to the ARG so people that has not played the game joins? Right now it’s the only thing I can thik off that I could do to help resolving the ARG. Well, maybe if somebody 
were to give us (yet) another clueghcoughcough… sorry, sore throat… Let me put it this way, the guy I’m really looking for is Mr. Clue
The main issue is that there are so many different paths and boatloads of data; in essence, we’re wading through all of it without any direction. I’m about 99% convinced half of it must be red herrings, and it will take some sporadic (and lucky) thinking to fit some of the pieces together to determine a fruitful direction sans the fluff.
I’ve been following this thread from its very beginning, but knowing nothing about cryptography and programming, can’t be of much help.
Was checking this thread again today and here’s what I thought - on his steam profile https://steamcommunity.com/id/stormseeker mentioned as follows:
“I might have hidden a few easter eggs here and there too, relating to pizzas and Alternate Reality Games”.
What bugs me, is this “Here and there” phrase. Could he probably hide some hints in his profile? Screenshots or hidden messages somewhere?
I also thought of ACII art, someone a few pages ago mentioned that those ciphers could possibly be merged into a picture but still, did anyone actually try that?
That is probably referencing the game itself, here and there as a figure of speech. About the ASCII art I don’t know, I have turned it into binary and tried different line lenghts and nothing, if there’s something to be seen it’s just too distorted, so probably not.
Even if you don’t know anything about cryptography you could try to solve it. I know nearly nothing, but there are plenty of cryptographic tools out there that are relatively easy to use following a tutorial, like openssl or even webpages were you can encrypt and decrypt data using several algorithms. The difficult part is guessing the password, and that, everyone can help with. Then again, this code might not be a ciphertext.
Completely agree with you. With all the data present, and thinking creatively, since the obvious has already been tried, there are too many things to try. Maybe somebody will go Eureka! and solve it. But I had several Eureka! moments already without being close (as far as I know) to the solution 
this seems verry likely to me looking back at what is been said, like stormseeker said it might not involve cryptography at all, and afterall this is HALOS.txt it might aswel be the actual HALOS code
it does not envolve cryptography at all and you can noway decrypt it
i tryed loading it in lua but the yeilded no results, now i dont know any other intresting languages,
i feel like toying aorund a bit tonite
if we want more poeple involved we should move the discussion to facebook, as forums are a dieing way of comunication
Facebook doesn’t seen right for an ARG, forums might not be popular, but for sure they are not dying and the way information is posted makes easier to follow what is happening in the ARG. Nevertheless, advertise the ARG on facebook might be a good idea, also, it could be advertised in forums specialised on cryptography, puzzles and the like.
About the code being a piece of software, well, the only thing I could think off is assembly language, but I never worked on it, so I cannot tell for sure, but it doesn’t strike me as such.
I believe someone from way back in the day tried it as assembly, and it complained about a missing header or something like that.
EDIT: Someone already converted it to assembly. Its nonsensical. https://paste.kde.org:8080/pee5b3b34/13756656
So I’ve made another desperate attempt to make a decryption key out of the grilled pizza image. I’ve already tried hashing it in various ways, with no luck, so I decided to try something completely different.
First, I took the bits that were decoded from the grilled pizza image and made a similar triangle out of single pixels, which resulted in a 33x17 image (shown here in 8:1 scale):
Then I simply resized the image to 25x13 (using no interpolation) and got this (again shown in 8:1 scale):
So what’s happened here is that some of the bits from the original triangle have been removed, but it’s still a close approximation of the grilled pizza pattern. But why 25x13? This triangle has 13 rows, therefore it has 13^2=169 cells/blocks/bits in it, and since the red cell at the top is used as a padding cell, we’re left with 168 bits, which is exactly the number of key bits in a Triple DES key. I converted it back to bits, and got (in hex):
0824d37156977996922b30928fb6d338924a4902c3
Then, I “stretched” the key bits by inserting zeros where the so called parity bits are supposed to go (every eight bit in a DES key is a parity bit which is used for error checking and have no bearing on the actual encryption/decryption), which resulted in the following 192-bit key (in hex):
0812346e14b45cf296488a6608943e6cd29c2448a4480a86
Unfortunately, the key didn’t work. I tried this procedure with both the original grilled pizza triangle bits (with the “tfexirklcrkzfejpflnfekyvGZQQR”), and the bits from a triangle made from the rotated text (“congratulationsyouwonthePIZZA”).
To be honest, I didn’t really expect it to work, but it seemed like a promising idea.
Another idea I had came out of something 0418_ wrote in the PM to Gunsrequiem:
The words patterns and rainbow made me think of the color bars TV test pattern which can be seen on one of the security screens in the game (found in the securitystation_screens_on2.vtf texture):
So I sampled the RGB color values of the seven main color bars found in that image which gave me 3*7=21 bytes (168 bits) of data, which I then “stretched” (as described earlier) to 192 bits to try as key for Triple DES. But I had no luck with that either. I even tried using the RGB values of the seven colors of the rainbow.
EDIT:
In case someone wants to verify my results, here’s a list of the resulting keys that came out of my experiments (in hexadecimal format). The shorter ones are the 168-bit versions, and the longer ones are the 192-bit versions with “dummy” parity bits inserted. The 192-bit keys are the ones that can be supplied to the Triple DES algorithm.
[code]The original grilled pizza (“tfexirklcrkzfejpflnfekyvGZQQR”) resized:
0824d37156977996922b30928fb6d338924a4902c3
0812346e14b45cf296488a6608943e6cd29c2448a4480a86
The “rotated” grilled pizza (“congratulationsyouwonthePIZZA”) resized:
0824cb4da45869e6bacdbabb2dbefb14e3814902c3
08123268da2260d2e65cb2b6aad8b67cfa8a387014480a86
The RGB color values of the SMPTE color bars found in-game:
f0f4f0f8fc0000fce300fc03f801f8f800000000f8
f07a3c1e8ee00000fc70c01ec01ee002f87c0000000002f0
The RGB color values of wikipedia’s version of the SMPTE color bars:
c0c0c0c0c00000c0c000c000c000c0c000000000c0
c06030180c000000c060001800060000c060000000000280
The seven colors of the rainbow (red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet):
ff0000ff7f00ffff0000ff000000ff4b00828b00ff
fe80001ef6f802fefe80001ef0000000fea4c010285802fe[/code]
You can test these keys with a encryption/decryption tool that accepts keys in hex format, like the one at https://tripledes.online-domain-tools.com/, or OpenSSL with the -K command-line option.
nice try
This made me remember a greyscale panel found ingame with several shades, but after checking, it has 16 shades. That was already tried, 4 bit greyscale, so I didn’t ever bother.
Updated the blog to reflect the current state of affairs–I will attempt to do so more often, as long as there’s something to make note of.
Furthermore, I just want to remind everyone that if you have something you’d like me to include on the blog, such as some deciphering attempts or some work you think may be relevant, simply visit the “Submissions” page to submit it and I’ll update accordingly.
Here’s an idea: convert every last bit of code and data we think is relevant and turn it into a txt file. Then print it out, take the resulting mass of paper, and burn it as a ritual sacrifice to whatever god you worship.
It can’t be any less likely to work than some of the stuff you guys are trying.
Loled so hard I nearly choke with an orange I was eating. Yeah, you’re right, the thing is, if the obvious solutions do not seem to work, you have to get creative, and that can lead to very weird things. I’m not trying anything new unless it seems really slick and elegant, and all the things I can think off are not.
I printed out the code on a poster-sized piece of paper and taped it over the screen of my TV. Then I watched the Wizard of Oz to see if anything weird would happen, such as the characters pointing to specific pieces of the code. In the end, all I got was a headache from trying to watch the movie between big, bold text.
It was worth a shot.
So I’ve been re-reading the thread for the third time…one thing I’ve noticed about ARG’s is the good ones tend to involve real life locations. I figure that’s outside the scope of this ARG, so what about fictional locations/references?
Heck I was a fan of Bugs when I was a kid.
So I googled [‘www.episodeguide.us/bugs/’ halo] and turned up one hit - the last episode to involve the Cyberax AI. Series 3 episode 10 - Renegade.
https://www.episodeguide.us/bugs/renegades/episode/102773/summary.html
Given the ARG seems to based on a whole bunch of things from the tv series Bugs (although I found no reference to pizza yet) I figure maybe the name HALOS means (based on the above) it’s staring us in the face (i.e. not cryptography but perhaps combination of 4 things/discs?)
…and/or it’s only part of the solution - if 4 discs had to be combined to restore the Cyberax AI then perhaps the solution is combining 4 things (Code A,B,C,D) either literally…
…or more figuratively.
Can the halos text be run through the 4 methods used for codes A,B,C,D (such as described with the ciphers above)?
I think focusing purely on ciphers can make you too close to the problem, so you are unable to see the bigger context that may provide a clue.
Personally I love puzzles where things are hidden in plain site (especially when they tell you they are) :freeman:
I’m a long time lurker too, and been eargely following the ARG since its beginning. All I can say is:
Holy. Facking. Shit. Sir… if this is not a breakthroguht, I don’t know what could be.
Code A was pig-pen cipher, code B was obtained by superposition of 4 abstract paintings found in the canteen, C was obtained turning a sound into an image, and code D was SECOM. This cannot be applied to the hex code in any way. Applying it literally with benaloh and paillier cryptosystems… well, you would need the private key to decrypt the message, that is, two relatively big prime numbers.
This is excellent work! I think you definitely got us further along, but I would make note that Code A, B and C weren’t encoded in any way that we could replicate on the hex code, as Angel said. However, we do have the 16-digit number that was created by codes A-D. Perhaps we should start investigating what 16-digit numbers can be used for (credit/debit cards, etc.), or how that 16-digit number could be applied to the hex code.
I really like the delving you did with the info we have, and I especially like the idea of using the four codes to solve our hex code. Could be on to something here . . . .
CatzEyes93 has a Youtube video titled Grilled Pizza; “Tutorial on what it is to make a great pizza including how you use your grill to bake it!~:”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkfilw4EMng
At 6 min into the video the picture freezes (sound still playing) &@ 7:09- 7: 31 min the video starts to roll several shots of the oven preparing the dough. At this time there are breaks in between the images. Could this be an embedded code?
Edit: Also, the images themselves (4 total) could be an extraction code like in the movie Johnny Mnemonic (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113481/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl