The history of Cicada 3301
Cicada 3301 is one of the internet’s greatest mysteries, a trail of puzzles that have not all been solved to this day. This article will explore their history and the current state of the mystery.
The first round of puzzles
Cicada became known for posting strange, somewhat unsettling puzzles that led solvers down an increasingly strange path. All this began with an image posted on the platform 4chan, on the 4th of January 2012. The message displayed in the image read:
Hello
We are looking for highly intelligent individuals. To find them we have devised a test.
There is a message hidden in this image. Find it and it will lead you on the road to finding us.
We look forward to meeting the few who will make it all the way through
Good luck
3301
Naturally, because people cannot resist a good mystery, many took up the challenge. However, this first puzzle could not be solved with conventional methods. Users discovered that the trick was to open the image in a text editor, displaying the image as text which represented pixel colours. When this was done, a message was found. This message said: Tiberius Claudius Caesar says “lxxt>33m2mqkyv2gsq3q=w]02ntk”
The reference to Caesar led people to decrypt this message with a Caesar cipher, that encodes a message by shifting the letters of the alphabet by a certain amount, or shift value. For instance, if the shift value is 3, A would become D, B would become E and so on. This message, decoded using a shift value of 4, became http://i.imgur.com/m9sYK.jpg
The solvers thought they hit a dead end but this was not the case. The two clues here were the words ‘guess’ and ‘out’. They told solvers they needed to use a steganography software called Outguess. Steganography is a method of hiding a message inside an image and Outguess can extract these messages. When the duck was run through Outguess, it led solvers to a Reddit page with two images, some Mayan numbers and several cryptic posts.
Doormat image from the Cicada 3301 Reddit page
When this image was run through Outguess, it gave solvers another message.
From here on out, we will cryptographically sign all messages with this key.
It is available on the mit keyservers. Key ID 7A35090F as posted under a2e7j6ic78h0j
Patience is a virtue
Good luck
3301
The key being referred to is a PGP key. PGP stands for Pretty Good Privacy and it is a way to encrypt messages in such a way that people can decode them using a publicly available key stored on a server, and also serves as a means of identifying if a message is authentic. Cicada’s use of this key gave users a way to make sure messages and clues were genuine, as by this time, false clues and fake messages had started to appear.
When another of the images was run through Outguess, it gave another message.
Stereogram image from the Cicada 3301 Reddit
The key has always been right in front of your eyes.
This is not the quest for the Holy Grail. Stop making it more difficult than it already is.
Good luck
3301
This gave solvers very little new information but it did show them that they were looking in the wrong place. The real clue on the Reddit page was in the Mayan numbers at the top of the page, in front of everyone’s eyes. These numbers, when properly decoded, gave a seemingly nonsensical result: kcohtgsmhirathosotnabca. However, this was not nonsense. This was the key to something called a Vigenere cipher, a type of code that uses a word to encode another word.
