Chapter ד

Welcome to RL,

Neo

So, let's move on to the next level of our game.
Thanks to the decryption of the codebook, we can decrypt the message that led us to Reddit. It's funny that the text turned out to be one of the stories about King Arthur.
Surely you have encountered them at school. For some reason, these stories are loved by humanities teachers and professors. Well, in any case, they might come in handy for you on this quest.
The Mabinogion.
The Lady of the Fountain
However, we wouldn’t be able to use the original text as a key, even if we knew that it definitely was ‘The Lady of the Fountain’, because we need to know exactly how the text was divided into lines to decrypt it.

But I will not torment you with the tedious counting of strings and characters, Instead, here’s the message we got:
Call us at us telephone numBer two one four three nine oh nine six oh eight
This message radically changes the rules of the game. For the first time, we get a task that isn’t online, but in the real world. Not using a computer, but a telephone.

This convinces me that we can forget any hacker-group affiliation. No would-be hacker would be interested in going further. A call to someone else's phone ALWAYS threatens the anonymity of the caller.

The owner of the number will be able to find out where he was called from, at best. At worst, cross-device attacks are possible, which we already told about in the video about network anonymity.
PROXY vs VPN vs TOR
How To Stay Anonymous
But more importantly, if I were to recruit people to a group using the 3301 riddle, then anyone who CALLED would immediately be considered to have failed the test!
Sumsub
Well, I hope you didn't dial the number indicated in the message either. And it's not about anonymity at all. It's just that the number has changed owners more than once over the past ten years.
Therefore, it is now impossible to go through the entire chain of riddles independently. But, if you had done this in early 2011, you would have heard this recording on the answering machine...
“
Very good. You have done well. There are three prime numbers associated with the original final.jpg image. 3301 is one of them. You will have to find the other two. Multiply all thr ee of these numbers together and add a .com on the end to find the next step. Good luck. Goodbye.
— 3301,
phone message at 2143909608
It's strange, usually, the puzzles should become more complicated as you progress, but here you don't even have to think much. We have already found a couple of other numbers in question. Remember, we noticed the strange size of the first picture? 503 and 509 are indeed prime numbers.

503 × 509 × 3,301= 845,145,127


All that remains is to add .com

And then my paranoia kicks up a tantrum — you can't do this. In the theory of information security, there is such a concept as "honey pot". This is a kind of bait that is left in a secure network to detect hackers. This technique works well on an elementary basis. Imagine that there is a computer on your network that no one knows about.
There is no complex software on it — only a utility that records the addresses of those who try to access it. What for? If a person tries to log on to this computer, it means that he has received its address by alternately going through all possible addresses in your network. And this is very similar to the actions of a hacker.

Niels Provos
he developed the OutGuess and Honeyd
Look, it is unlikely that you would have visited 845145127.com having made a typo or accidentally picked it up. The search engines didn't know anything about it either. So, everyone who went for it is definitely interested in the riddles of 3301. There could be no casual visitors there. It seems to me that this is essentially similar to a honeypot. This is the second blow to your anonymity.

By the way, Niels Provos, the author of the OutGuess, is a known developer of such bait programs. It's called Honeyd. An interesting coincidence, isn't it?
In any case, like the phone, this site has long been owned by other people.

I tried to find out what this site looked like 10 years ago with web.archive.org but I was already set up for failure. The earliest copy of this site dates back to 2013. By that time, all the information from it had already been deleted.
Sumsub
So, if you went to the website at the beginning of 2012, you would see a picture with a cicada and a countdown timer.

And, I'm sure, you would first check this picture with OutGuess.

There was indeed an encouraging message in it!

No one could have predicted exactly what would happen on January 9. On this day, a list of GPS coordinates relating to 14 points scattered around the world appeared on the site.
8 of them were located in the United States,
2 in both Paris and Seoul,
one in Poland
and one in Australia.
In all cases, the coordinates indicated points on the streets of cities. It seems that 3301 has decided to finally end the anonymity of hunters for the Holy Grail. What could be easier than waiting for the quest participant at the specified location.
But there were still volunteers. And soon photos of all these places appeared on the network, it turned out that at the specified coordinates there were ordinary lampposts, on which posters with the already familiar cicada and QR codes appeared.
It quickly became clear that the QR codes on the pillars are repeated — there are only two different versions of the message.
As you can see, this is again a book cipher, and the link to the code book is now given in the form of a riddle.
I didn’t spend a long time looking for the second book. It was the creation of the father of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson.
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) by William Gibson
A small poem called "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)" was distributed only on three-inch floppy disks. In addition to the text of the work itself, an encryption program was recorded on the diskette. After you opened the poem and read it, a program would launch and the poem would be encrypted. You could read it once and only once.

According to Gibson's plan, this poem could not be saved, copied or read a second time. Reality played a cruel joke on him. At the presentation, the poem was read aloud by the famous illusionist Penn Jillett.

The text was projected in parallel on the screen behind him. One of the visitors of the presentation managed to capture what was happening on video and the next day posted the full text of the work in open access.

In 2012, this story was again on everyone's lips — a competition was announced on the network to decrypt the corrupted text of the poem. The prize was a complete collection of Gibson's works.
The codebook for the second encryption turned out to be volume 6 of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The required section included words from Chitral to Cincinnati. Yeah, the word cicada was also present in it.
Both encryptions led to the same result — a site address, intended for the darknet.

sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion

Version IV.
The Game
The transition to the anonymous darknet puts an end to another version of what is happening — a network game.
The transition to the anonymous darknet puts an end to another version of what is happening — a network game. Such entertainment was rapidly gaining popularity at that time. Sometimes they were even used for commercial purposes.
For example, six months before the appearance of the first riddle of 3301, The Code was broadcasted by the BBC. This is a three-part educational film dedicated to the basic concepts of modern mathematics.

To attract the attention of the audience, the authors of the film launched a series of mathematical puzzle games on the Internet.

1,000 participants of the competition gradually completed tasks and answered questions related to the topics of the film. The final test was held offline — in the same Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing hacked the Enigma code.
Welcome to the Code
But the nature of this competition was radically different from our riddle. Using Tor-type software can be dangerous for inexperienced users. If their computers become exit points for the darknet — they will bear all responsibility for the activities of intruders.
It wasn’t possible to catch advertising on 3301, only open and free software was used to solve riddles. And not so many users coped with the installation of the same OutGuess — most were just waiting for the results of other people.
So, we need to go deeper.
Into the DarkWeb.
The first visitors of this site witnessed an email address field, and an invitation to the next level of the game.
Congratulations!
Please create a new email address with a public, free web-based service. Once you've never used before, and enter it below. We recommend you do this while still using tor, for anonymity.
We will email you a number within the next few days (in the order in which you arrived at this page). Once you've received it, come back to this page and append a slash and then the number you received to this url. (For example, if you received "3894894230934209", then you would go to "[http:// http://sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion/3894894230934209]")
3301
Pay attention to the first paragraph. It contains instructions that are obvious to any Tor user. Who would think of installing and configuring special software designed to protect the anonymity of the user, and then still give their real email address? This is frankly an unnecessary recommendation.
But the second paragraph is more interesting — it assumes that an individual task will be formed for each participant of the game and the achieved result will be recorded. This is kind of how the newly-developed remote learning systems were designed at that time.
The decrypted page address quickly spread among those interested in the 3301 riddles and soon the text changed.
“
You've shared too much to this point. We want the best, not the followers. Thus, the first few there will receive the prize.
— 3301,
sq6wmgv2zcsrix6t.onion
Naturally, the field for entering an email address had also disappeared.
It is not known for sure what tasks came next to those participants who managed to register and how many of them there were. I came across several variants of individual tasks on the web— with the classic cryptographic task of finding prime factors of a large number, the task of decrypting a fragment of a melody in MIDI, but all these are just separate pieces of the mosaic.
We can only say for sure that soon a new picture appeared on Reddit, where the first riddle, with a book encryption, was posted.
3301 kept its promise. New puzzles appeared in January 2013 and 2014. In 2017, the trail of another chain of riddles surfaced, but the authors of these stories never revealed themselves.
So what was the mystery of 3301 really?
Now I'm sure I know the answer.
Remember, while talking about this story, I explained the basic encryption algorithms, we remembered the work of the WWII decryptors and talked about modern hacker groups. Classical English literature and modern digital art also surfaced in the riddles. And also- unusual software, features of network security, features of the declaration of independence and the secrets of the gold miners…

If you’ve watched our video to the end, it means that you’re really fascinated by this mystery.
Now imagine that you are not watching this video, but instead, 10 years ago, you were scouring forums and chats in search of tips and solutions. You read discussions, you argued, you learned new words and terms. The world of cryptography and big maths is getting closer and clearer for you.

All this reminds me of Dan Brown’s books, from which millions of people learned about the unusual sculptures in Rome and the mysteries of Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings!
Is it true that such a detective story is much more interesting than ordinary textbooks and lectures?
Riddle 3301 is a next-generation interactive educational game project.
Sumsub
And in this format, the decryption of riddles was very easy to control. If the participants were standing in one place or they had reached a dead end, it was always possible to anonymously suggest a solution on the same 4chan.

Well, the more hype around the project, the more young people learn about it, the more likely it is that at least one of them will connect their future with mathematics, cryptography or programming. This works like contextual advertising — let only 1 person out of 1000 click on the ad, but if you show the ad to 10,000,000 visitors — you’ll make a ton of cash.
Never discount the indirect evidence. Remember – the style of texts are characteristic of middle-aged and well-educated Americans. This person has access to very specific literature (how many of you have the 11th edition of the Britannica in your bookcase). From here, a student program for steganography and a server with MIT addresses appeared.

It’s not difficult for a professor to arrange such a thing, with the appearance of posters around the world - if necessary, both students and colleagues will help.
By the way, can you guess why the image of a cicada was used?
Researchers of 3301 like to associate this with the fact that the breeding cycles of these insects are tied to prime numbers — larvae of different species develop in the ground for 5, 7, 11 and even 17 years, and, as I have already said, prime numbers are the basis of modern cryptography.

It's beautiful, but we’ve got one small step left. In the early 90s, a group of young scientists at the Berkeley Institute worked on the problems of cryptography, encryption and anonymity. For their tasks, they used the domain name cicada.berkeley.edu.
This is mentioned in the distributions of several programs, old correspondence and the legendary Cypherpunks mailing list. Surely you've heard of it.

Among its participants were: the creator of the PGP system Philip Zimmermann, Tor developer Jacob Appelbaum, Timothy May from Intel and even the ideologist of WikiLeaks – Julian Assange.
A coincidence?