So on October 6th 1o57 (who creates the DEF CON badge challenge) gave a fantastic talk at the hackaday 10th anniversary which you should totally watch:


(go ahead, I’ll wait)

You might have noticed some random text in the slides, but you might not have. Anyway here are the slides


And here is a copy of all the letters on each of the slides

DO
XIYL
DCYV
DKIK
NKUM
KRYD
NBYG
ONYM
NXOC

on one line:

DOXIYLDCYVDKIKNKUMKRYDNBYGONYMNXOC

Hrmmm, well the first thing you might try is a Caesar cipher. In the video you’ll notice that 1o57 repeatedly mentions that it’s Hackaday’s TENTH anniversary, so we should try decrypting the above string with a key of 10. (here’s a tool do to that)

TENYOBTSOLTAYADAKCAHOTDROWEDOCDNES

(side note: I cheated on this step by using an automated caesar cipher breaker)

Hrmmm that still looks like nonsense, but it does start with the word ten, so we’re probably close...

Wait a second! The string is backwards! It’s not ten it’s net!

SENDCODEWORDTOHACKADAYATLOSTBOYNET

or cleaned up

Send codeword to hackaday@lostboy.net

Ok, well now we know where to send the codewords. The only unsolved part of the puzzle is this last slide




WTF are those things?! Now fans of Sherlock Holmes may recognize these, but at the time I did not, so I went to my best friend Google to try and figure it out. I tried lots of search terms like “stickman code" (and variants on that) and “semaphore" (since I thought maybe the positions on the flags was significant), until I came across this page:

http://www.geocachingtoolbox.com/index.php?lang=en&page=dancingMen

which features a code called the Dancing Men!

This code comes from a Sherlock Holmes novel called The Adventure of the Dancing Men



And we can use the above image to decrypt the band, which decrypts to:

codeword psychobilly ciphers

Thanks for the fun puzzle 1o57!