DEF CON 24
Table of Contents
1. Overview
DEF CON 24 (August 4–7, 2016). Paris & Bally's, Las Vegas.
TODO: confirm attendance.
2. Badge Contest — 1o57
1o57 is DEF CON's recurring badge puzzle master (since DC20). The contest awards a Black Badge — lifetime free admission. The puzzle is a multi-layer ARG spanning the physical badge, conference booklet, GPS coordinates across Las Vegas, and files on media.defcon.org.
2.1. Cipher Pipeline
| Stage | Encoding | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Caesar / ROT shift | Booklet string → "So you are on the right path, DEFCON 24" |
| 2 | Vigenere | Polyalphabetic substitution with XX padding |
| 3 | GPS coordinate lookup | Physical Las Vegas locations → clue words |
| 4 | One-time pad | Key words "nonpareil" + "bimil" (Korean: secret) |
| 5 | Password-protected RAR | 1o57.rar on media.defcon.org; password is a puzzle output |
Stages 1–2 are directly testable in the encode tool. Stage 4 (OTP) is a bijection given the key — same structure as the DC27 EFF T-shirt puzzle.
Konami code on the skull badge was a deliberate red herring.
2.2. Files on media.defcon.org
- Badge contest files
Origin-Story.txt(22 KiB) — winning creative writing entry; may contain steganographic clues1o57.rar(2.6 MiB) — password-protected archive
3. References
- buer.haus: DC24 Badge Challenge Walkthrough
- Council of Nine: DC24 Badge Challenge
- Decrypting DEF CON badge challenges
- Encode tool — decode badge ciphers interactively
- Reversible Pipeline Transforms — the theory