Ghost in the Shellcode 2014 - Trivia

lugkist

:

This problem gave us a file, which when opened with 7zip, gave us the following file:

Find the key.
GVZSNG
AXZIOG
YNAISG
...
AXLSOG

All together there were 62 lines with 6 letters each. Also, we noticed that only sixteen letters were used: A, P, Z, L, G, I, T, Y, E, O, X, U, K, S, V, and N. First we unsuccessfully tried many simple ciphers. After reaching a dead end, we googled "6 letter codes" and noticed that NES Game Genie cheat codes were six letters long and used the same sixteen letters. Running these codes through us a decoder gave a hexadecimal value and address. Sorting the ASCII characters for the values and sorting them by address gave us "Power overwhelming? Back in my day cheats did not have spaces."

Inview

This challenge was a C file given by the competitors. A quick look around a a click on the border of the code revealed that there was extra spacing at the end of the code. No one willing puts extra tabs/newlines/spaces on the end of their code. Copying the entire C file into an online whitespace interpreter produced the winning output: WhitespaceProgrammingIsHard.

-albinotomato