EFF’s DEF CON 30 Puzzle—SOLVED

Puzzlemaster Aaron Steimle of the Muppet Liberation Front contributed to this post.

Every year, EFF joins thousands of computer security professionals, tinkerers, and hobbyists for Hacker Summer Camp, the affectionate term used for the series of Las Vegas technology conferences including BSidesLV, Black Hat, DEF CON, and more. EFF has a long history of standing with online creators and security researchers at events like these for the benefit of all tech users. We’re proud to honor this community’s spirit of curiosity, so each year at DEF CON we unveil a limited edition EFF member t-shirt with an integrated puzzle for our supporters (check the archive!). This year we had help from some special friends.

“The stars at night are big and bright down on the strip of Vegas”

For EFF’s lucky 13th member t-shirt at DEF CON 30, we had the opportunity to collaborate with iconic hacker artist Eddie the Y3t1 Mize and the esteemed multi-year winners of EFF’s t-shirt puzzle challenge: Elegin, CryptoK, Detective 6, and jabberw0nky of the Muppet Liberation Front.

Extremely Online members’ design with an integrated challenge.

The result is our tongue-in-cheek Extremely Online T-Shirt, an expression of our love for the internet and the people who make it great. In the end, one digital freedom supporter solved the final puzzle and stood victorious. Congratulations and cheers to our champion cr4mb0!

But How Did They Do It?

Take a guided tour through each piece of the challenge with our intrepid puzzlemasters from the Muppet Liberation Front. Extreme spoilers ahead! You’ve been warned…

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Puzzle 0

The puzzle starts with the red letters on the shirt on top of a red cube. Trying common encodings won’t work, but a quick Google search of the letters will return various results containing InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) links. The cube is also the logo for IPFS. Thus, the text on the shirt resolves to the following IPFS hash/address:

ipfs://bafkreiebzehf2qlxsm5bdk7cnrnmtnojwb53bnwyrgkkt7ypx5u53typcu

QR codes have a standard format and structure that requires the large squares to be placed in three of the four corners. With this in mind, the image can be seen as four…