alberti
Summary
Whoops! All ciphers!
This is what I tend to like more to do, cipher-esque puzzles. I think this is the hardest section out of the 4, as each one has their nuisances and in the end you will need to investigate to understand what they are used for to get the final answer.
alberti_1
First one starts with something most people have used when doing puzzles with ciphers, and that is base conversions.
I could have gone with the most challenging ones but I decided to go with some of the most popular ones. These are binary, octal, decimal, hexadecimal and Base64. All of these can be called as well by their base, which indicates the amount of printable characters they use (binary uses 0 to 1, octal 0 to 7, decimal 0 to 9 and on...).
The order of decoding is left to right and that is apparent when you look at the ciphertext which is in binary (the leftmost hinted base)
Here's the decoding process with different websites:
Given how we are told the answer is a 12 character string and this result has 12 characters, the final answer then will be:
>Žók¶|M¶AÖ
NOTE: As far as I've tested the only issue one could have depending on websites is mostly with the Base64 step. That's why I specified the length, as sometimes websites give wrong outputs or don't want to decode it. Here is an example:
alberti_2
This is my favourite puzzle in this project of mine :)
We have in front of us 2 messages, one from the BLU spy and the other for you, so we can already asume one message has the clues needed to decode the other.
Let's start with spy: ignoring the french text for a moment, the two strings of letters present link to an edited image extracted from the TF2 Wiki about the ambassador which is missing 2 percentages with question marks and has the last line changed to a quote attributed to Julius Caesar.
This is an obvious reference to the Caesar cipher, and what we have to do is decode the two letter strings using the missing numbers: -15 and 20. Each one is used depending on it's vertical position (-15 is above, so it will be used for the line above in the message and 20 for the one below). The final result will be the following:
GOSTABMEDHLYWTVRCZXJNKFI
himredspyqwtvknbalcufxzo
Given the context we can deduce this is the right answer: the medic is the red spy. That's the end for our friend, but for us is only the beginning.
Remember the french text? Translating it we get that "the title is the key" and "don't forget to decode" in english. If it's not clear by now, our text given in the raffle is encoded with the Alberti cipher and we must use the decoder in the DCode website.
Knowing the cipher, one should realize that what we have decoded from spy are the outer and inner disks from the wheel cipher (uppercase and lowercase). That means we have only three pieces of information left to decode the cipher: the initial shift, the periodic increment and the period length. To obtain these we have to look at the remaining mystery in spy's message, which is the disguise kit emote.
We are presented with 3/9 classes in game of TF2, and in each image there are hidden characters. These are "I.S." in soldier, "P.I." in heavy and "P.L" in sniper, and funnily enough they are the initials for the missing components in the cipher. It is evident that these 3 are what we have to use to finish the puzzle.
In TF2, to change to a class by keybind using the disguise kit you use a numerical reference for each class. From left to right, the ones shown would be 2, 5 and 8.
The final prepared scheme we should have to decode is the following:
Hitting "DECRYPT" we will get our mysterious message:
DOBEWORRYDOBEWORTHDOSOLVETHEMALL
alberti_3
It is pretty fast to find out the cipher referenced here, although slighty annoying to solve depending if you use a website or not.
Straight to the point, the cipher is the Gravity Falls color substitution cipher. It is hinted by the clip shown from the show and the text that mentions "gravity" and "fall".
After manually solving or using an online tool, you will get the following text:
ABBREVIATION
MOBARIOTGAME
QUESTIONMARK
And below:
ALL CAPS
The first part references "League Of Legends" made by Riot, which abbreviated is "lol". The "QUESTIONMARK" is literal, which means you have to add it in the end.
Following the format, the final password then will be:
LOL?
alberti_4
No, this is not a hash decoding puzzle lol.
The hashes provided are made up and do not work, what we have to do it's to analyze each line and find the two characters that repeat the most in each line and from there decode them as hexadecimal characters. Both factors are hinted in a hidden letter "h" with a link to a song named "The Alarm - Spirit of '76". The "h" makes it so that "exactly" is "hexactly" (hint for hex) and the last numbers in the song indicate the first and second character of each hex encoded letter of the answer (the first repeats 7 times and the second 6).
In the end we should have the following sequence of numbers:
54 68 65 48 61 73 68 68 61 6e 73 68 61 68
The decoded message, and the answer to the puzzle, is:
TheHashhanshah
alberti_gate
The final challenge of this section follows similarities with the past puzzles.
We can ignore the video linked at the moment, so let's analyze the image linked:
We have what looks like an encoded text, the picture of an elephant and a "legend" in the form of a red dot which indicates a dice. Let's start with the dice and the text.
Below the dice there is a hidden text that reads "PROFILE". Given no indication of any specific profile, why don't we go to mine and check it out?
That same dice emote appears there! Clicking it will lead us to an archive of a raffle series of mine, and if we investigate the entire documment we will find at the bottom a peculiar link to the "Garceus Language", an old made up substitution cipher of mine:
It is clear this was used in the elephant image, and if we do the right subtitutions we will get the message "A SECURITY SITE". All of this then points out to a website and a cipher present in it: the Elephant - Light-weight cipher.
This means that the final password must be obtained using something present in the other 4 puzzles... their passwords, and there are different hints on their entered messages that indicate their function in the cipher:
If you have done everything correctly, you should have the following in your page:
What we want from this is the resulting "Cipher" text, which has to be decoded using hexadecimal given the characters present (0-9 A-F). Before however one should remove the last 4 digits, as hinted by the linked video in the gate raffle for a short period during the green number part with the rainbow huggy wuggy.
The ultimate password then will be:
CapunoCaigut
Fun fact: the answer is in catalonian and means "Fallen Capuno". This is a reference to an user that made puzzles in the past with ciphers and abandoned the site, Capuno.