What the --?! Try googling or binging the 99Nb isotope’s atomic mass, 98.911618 …
Yes! Our answer is the Horseshoe Pub and Pizza!
I’m new to this ARG and to ARGs in general but I’m really impressed by how far you’ve gotten with these challenges!
I believe it is important to further fill-in the storyline. I have tried a lot of combinations to access bmrf.us via SSH at both port 22 and port 37 – as Cyrillic pointed out, port 37 has traditionally been used for the time service and “time reveals all”… However, I have been unsuccessful in gaining entrance using login halos & password benalohpaillier (in all sorts of forms… Halos/halos/HALOS, benalohpaillier/BENALOHPAILLIER/etc, even BenallohPaillier (double l) as is seen in the first post). Perhaps it will take more time before the login becomes active, but:
As I understand from the wiki about ARGs, “Instead of presenting a chronologically unified, coherent narrative, designers scatter pieces of the story across the Internet and other media, allowing players to reassemble it, supply connective tissue and determine what it means.”
Vox populi vox Dei could also mean that our voices are the voice of the puppetmaster. We can shape the ARG as well as the puppetmaster! This might gain us access to the bmrf.us site.
What happened between Dr Horn and his colleagues? Who has built what?
Who is watching? A few hints have been given: an omniscient AI presence, maybe? Does it need the niobium to generate more and more circuits? Could this be related to the disappearances and the “level 7 cases” (IRC Clue 5) that have been sent in? Human experiments, maybe?
Now, I see am I bit late to this party, so I have reading up to do before actually trying to connect it all…
I tried rotating the 376b-file adding values from 0 to 255 (and then MOD 256 to stay within ASCII range), but that didn’t yield anything. (Not that I expected it since all the byte values are almost evenly spread from 0 to 255, meaning that there e.g. cannot be, say, a large block of text - at least not if it’s just ASCII rotated.)
Also, I tried looking for hints on e.g. file formats or other data that’s 376 bytes in length, but all I could find are viruses or other irrelevant stuff.
Oh, and if you rotate BENALOHPAILLIER by 3, you get what they think we are (spaces added by me):
EHQ DORKS D LOOL HU 
Did you guys notice that there’s an encryption algorithm called Benaloh?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benaloh_cryptosystem
And also an algorithm called Paillier?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paillier_cryptosystem
If you cascade these, wouldn’t it be reasonable to call it “BenalohPaillier”?!?!
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the atomic mass of the 99Nb isotope exactly matches the longitude coordinate of the Horseshoe Pub & Pizza found on this yahoo directory page - N29.970285, W98.911618 (the coordinates can be found in the html source of the yahoo page). But what if there’s a clue here as well? If there is, then this clue would be the most extraordinary and uncanny clue I’ve seen so far.
If you enter these coordinates into Google Maps or Google Earth, you don’t end up right in front of the Horseshoe Pub & Pizza, but at a location nearby. There’s something peculiar about this place where you actually end up - right in front of this beautiful tree. This tree gave me an idea.
Could this tree be a representation of the Tree of Knowledge (Arbor Scientia), or the Tree of Life (Arbor Vitae)?
It’s a fascinating idea.
I feel like I have to clarify some things here.
DonL: This was noted right after we found this “password”.
The problem is the same problem we had with RSA, one needs (hard to get) correct parameters to use them (a product of two primes, …).
flavrans9: This is not a coincidence at all. Anyone owning a Yahoo account can submit these locations.
Note that even the 14 from 98.911618(14) is present in the source
<span class="hdn" id="HDN_lon">-98.911618</span>
<span class="hdn" id="HDN_zoom">14</span>
Noted. I’m not suggesting we book NSA’s computer time to break this, only to keep our eyes open for numbers that appear prime; If we were to find the two sufficiently large primes, then decryption shouldn’t be too hard.
And thanks for your remark on your observation re the two ciphers; I didn’t notice it when reading through all the posts.
I have a question: If the key length is 1024 bits, won’t all encrypted messages be exactly n*1024 bits long?
According to Google Maps, the location is in the middle of the yard. However, Google Maps also marks the address 419 Front St with an “A” marker right in front of the tree. Isn’t that what you’re referring to?
Sorry, but I seriously doubt that.
Have anybody checked out the other coordinates on Google Street View? I half imagined a huge sign saying “Congratz, You Won The Biiig Prize!” 
No. There is a difference between “key size” and “block size”. Key size refers to the length of the key, while block size refers to the size of each “block” of data being processed at any one time. Therefore the message length must be a multiple of block size, while the key size plays no role here.
I’m aware of that. And yes, the uncertainty value 14 is equal to the map zoom factor on the page, but 14 seems to be the default zoom factor on all (or most) yahoo directory pages. So at least that is a coincidence.
What I really meant to say in my previous post, was that if the developer(s) had anything to do with this, with the intention of making a clue out of it (and not just a wink to the players), I wouldn’t hesitate to go as far as calling this ARG a masterpiece. It gives you the impression that everything is somehow connected, even if it isn’t. To me, there seems to be enough material in the clues (and in the clues and references in the game itself) to form the basis of a compelling story which touches on topics like cutting edge or frontier science, philosophy, ethics, religion, etc. I just thought it would be interesting and fun to explore some of that. Perhaps I’m making too much out of it, but I still think there may be something in the story that we need to figure out in order to solve the hex code puzzle.
Another thing I’ve noticed about the list of Niobium isotopes, is that all of the isotopes listed are among the heavier isotopes (with more neutrons in the nucleus) which exhibit ß- (beta minus) decay (except for a few that are nuclear isomers that decay though an isomeric transition). This is highly circumstantial, but one of the whiteboards has a drawing of a Feynman diagram for a ß- decay, and has a reference to Dr. Horn below. This is the so called “nuclear alchemy board” with the Philosopher’s Stone code. Some say that the Philosopher’s Stone and the Tree of Life/Tree of Knowledge are just different names for the same idea or concept. But there’s really no way to tell if this was meant as a clue since the ß- decay depicted on this board is most likely related to the beta decay of the thallium isotope (turning it into lead) in the nuclear transmutation formula, and thus has nothing to do with Niobium in this context. However, the reference to the Philosopher’s Stone was one of the factors that made me propose the idea of the Tree of Knowledge in the first place.
Technically, the coordinates are located in the front yard of a house, with a garden full of trees, about 200-300 feet from Horseshoe Pub & Pizza. So, depending on which direction you look, you may be looking at one of two trees. But Google guesses the address of this location and puts the “A” marker at some boundary point between the road and the property, and it just so happens, that when you enter streetview, you’re looking almost straight at the largest tree in the front yard.
Seems as though we are dying a bit again.
I encourage you all to submit your ideas here or on the blog using the contributions section. Again, no matter how small or inconsequential you believe your idea to be, it could be the key to another breakthrough. Better yet, if you have any thoughts as to the meaning of the clues or a potential site we can use to “access” the HALOS files, please share them.
Well, Mr. Guns, you have inspired me. Though I sense that all that I can do has been done, I present this. This probably has no relation to the actual puzzle, but there is a Black Mesa Region of New Mexico, apparently with Niobium. This is probably related to the story Storm has been pushing for us to develop.
OK. I had a small idea which seemed to be nice, but failed. I thought the “ThEpIzZaIsaLiE…HALOS” message was hint for the case of the letters in the password… if it really is a block cipher. I didn’t find anything of corresponding length, though.
From the HALOS.txt file:
I was pondering over the meaning of this, then I discovered these guys. They starred in a comedy/rock musical called “Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny” featuring this character (music video here). Also, their first appearance in a movie was in a comedy movie called “Bio-Dome”.
So, we may have yet another Satan/The Devil/Lucifer/Demon reference in the clues. This makes me more and more convinced that the cipher must be DES (or TripleDES) since DES was based on the Lucifer cipher.
However, you could also make this argument: Satan = demon = daemon, and HAFB = Holloman Air Force Base -> Holloman -> hollow man = empty shell ? => Secure Shell daemon. Could the code be a DES/TripleDES encrypted SSH key? The problem is converting the code to a private key file acceptable by the ssh client. For OpenSSH, the private key file must be in PEM format. If the key is DES encrypted, you will also need an 8-byte salt, specified in the PEM file, which is needed to derive the correct encryption key from the passphrase, and is also used as IV. Since we do not have this salt value, this seems impossible.
Probably absolutely nothing, but I looked up the Horseshoe Pub & Pizza on street view and found that it was for sale, phone: 210-317-6742. Other than it being a phone number can anything be made of those digits?
Subject analysis: tenacious might be a reference to the Portal 2 lab rat comic.
I haven’t read that comic, but that seems plausible considering the other Portal references in this ARG, like this one:
It’s probably nothing, but “ComLabs Test Initiative” made me think of this: “RSA Laboratories Standards Initiatives”.
I had another idea about “Vox populi vox Dei”. It could also be related to the key to the inner code in IRC clue 5, which was the disputed quote by Giordano Bruno:
This statement is essentially arguing against the idea of Vox populi vox Dei. Perhaps Giordano Bruno is more important to the story than we might think. Giordano Bruno was a philosopher, astronomer and mathematician who was burned alive at the stake for heresy by the Roman Inquisition, as a result of his controversial scientific ideas at the time. Some of his work is very interesting and might provide clues as to what’s going on in the story.
I’m wondering if there could be a word, phrase or quote along these lines that perhaps would be the password/passphrase used as the encryption key for the code.
If the HALOS code is a message encrypted with DES/TripleDES (or another 64-bit block cipher), the problem we are struggling with is that there are any number of ways to convert a password string to a key of the correct size (64 bits for DES). The recommended key derivation algorithm nowadays is PBKDF2, but that method is usually called with a chosen hash function, a salt and an iteration count, which complicates things. Perhaps we need to look for a specific DES implementation, a “vintage” DES encryption tool like Cipher 3.0 by David A. Barrett (fast-des3.0.tar.Z), or the DES command in the libdes library by Eric A. Young (OpenSSL was based on much of his work).
Or, perhaps something more accessible like this javascript DES implementation: https://www.tero.co.uk/des/test.php. On this page you can paste the hex code (without spaces just in case) into the message field and enter an ascii string as the key. Note that it will just use the string directly as the DES key, without hashing it or anything. If the key string is has more than eight characters, TripleDES will be used. I’ve tried all the passwords I can think of with this, but haven’t had any luck so far, obviously.
EDIT:
Another idea… in the picture on the wiki clue page, to the right of the person’s head, the word LIES is handwritten in a peculiar way, resembling something like this: <[/SIZE] IES. I can’t really replicate it properly here, the L is tilted to the right so that the ‘LI’ looks like ‘<[/SIZE]I’, and the ‘E’ character is elevated or superscripted. It’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m wondering if this could mean “bit shift left by 1 Entire password String”. This would actually make sense when dealing with DES, since DES only uses 56 bits of the 64-bit key, the least significant bit in each byte of the key is used for parity and is usually just discarded. ASCII characters only use the lower 7 bits of a byte, so you will lose password entropy by passing an ASCII string as the key directly to the DES algorithm, since the lowest bit in each character will be lost. By bit shifting each byte in the string to the left by 1, you have a very simple and rudimentary key derivation method for DES. Or perhaps the ‘<[/SIZE]I’ is supposed to resemble a mirrored D, or the scribble has no meaning whatsoever other than spelling the word LIES.
Still trying to guess https://www.thestormseeker.com/wibble password.
Guessings :
Username possibilities:
drhorn
HALOS
guest
Password possibilities:
congratulationsyouwonthepizza
guest
…
I’m done with guessing.
https://forums.blackmesasource.com/showpost.php?p=517357&postcount=1201
Stormseeker already said wibble wasn’t part of the ARG.
Lol…
Seriously though, IMO, it is reasonable to assume that we were supposed to be able to solve the current code puzzle with the clues we had already been given before the wiki clue dropped, and the logical consequence of that is that we should try and look for something in the latest wiki clue that can be corroborated by clues/hints found in the earlier clue messages. But that seems to be easier said than done, since it can be so difficult to determine if something might be a puzzle clue, story/mythology clue, easter egg, red herring or just a freak coincidence. And who knows, it might even be some combination of these.