Hello and welcome to Cracking Cicada 3301, the future of collaborative puzzle solving.
I'm Puck and today we're going to be giving you a brief introduction to the Cicada 3301 puzzles
and then we're going to be talking about how our community, Cicada Solvers, about 7,000 people on Discord,
is working together to solve this.
So to get the obvious question out of the way, what is Cicada 3301 and who are we?
Cicada 3301 is a pretty mysterious group, there's a lot of talks about that.
They are basically a mysterious international organization, as they have called themselves,
that has released three increasingly difficult cryptographic puzzles.
The first one was in 2012, which went solved, 2013, solved, and 2014,
which is the current step of a 58-page...
pagebook of runes called Liber Primus, which has gone unsolved, only two pages of which have been solved,
which is right away, and the 56 other ones have stumped solvers for nine years now.
And for who those solvers are, we tend to flock to, like, this main hub called Cicada Solvers.
It's a Discord server and it expands elsewhere into, like, Reddits and stuff like that,
but the main hub is the Cicada Solvers Discord server,
it's got about 7,000 people, and it's the main group of people interested in the Cicada 3301 puzzles.
All of us are from this group. I am Puck. I kind of take the role of the community organizer.
I've been here since about 2019 and, like, been organizing these things called voice sessions,
which we'll touch on later, since 2020.
And I'll hand it over to Taiwo here.
Hi, I'm Taiwo. I take more of a technical role in the community.
I do things like creation of tools, but also kind of server administration, technical things like that,
and also kind of like a higher level role of sort of community direction, things along those lines.
I have been in the community since 2013, so...
since kind of before the most recent stage, but not really since the beginning,
but still for a considerable length of time, and it definitely feels like it.
I found great inspiration from these puzzles.
I've grown significantly, constantly humbled by them, even after solutions were coming out,
and that's kind of my main motivation, to sort of introduce the puzzles to new people
and to have others grow and just grow, as I've grown.
That's kind of my primary inspiration.
Also, if we manage to solve the unsolved step, that'd be just a sweet bonus.
I'm handing it over to Clockwork.
Hello, I am the Clockwork Bird.
My job is, you know, community engagement.
Part of what I do is...
I am almost like a teacher.
I am like a tour guide of the interactive museum that is Solvers.
What I like to do is, you know, I like to host those voice sessions.
I also, in addition to hosting things like technical solving sessions,
I like to talk about the art, literature, and the philosophy that have been utilized throughout the puzzle.
My background is in anthropology.
Specifically, I have an interest in ethnographic work,
so Cicada has been an opportunity to see a digital community
and see ways that we can build engagement
and bring together people with different technical skill sets and different skill levels
and all have to collaborate in the same place on the same thing
and have the same level of fun.
I'm going to pass it off to my buddy Art.
What's up, nerds?
I hope everybody is enjoying and is very excited for DEF CON 31.
I know that we all are.
My name is Artorias.
Thank you, thank you.
My name is Artorias.
I consider myself something of an archivist of the Cicada 3301 phenomenon.
I created a website called cicadasolvers.com,
which is essentially intended to be an improvement upon the Uncovering Cicada Wikia.
Additionally, along with my co-speakers here,
we run a podcast.
We have a podcast called Cicadacast,
and this is intended to be an educational exploration of all things Cicada 3301.
I also moderate the rcicada subreddit, which has 30,000 members,
in addition to the cicadasolvers discord, which has about 7,000 members.
That's about it for my introduction.
So now back to Puck.
All right, so what a lot of people have heard about Cicada 3301
is just a matter of misconception.
So we figured might as well just clear all that out of the way
in case any of you guys have heard anything.
So on social media, especially YouTube,
you see a lot of fake puzzles,
which might sound quite strange because 3301,
the group behind these, has literally given PGP,
like you can verify that something is from them,
and people still make fake puzzles and try to,
I don't really know why,
but people just try to gamejack Cicada 3301,
and they do cryptocurrency scams.
So if you see that, do not fall for it.
They are not Cicada.
And also the news, what you guys ought to see with that,
especially back in 2012 when the puzzles were really popping off,
there's a lot of clickbait, like yellow journalism.
They really focus on, oh, Cicada 3301 is a mystery.
The Wikipedia page will call it, it seems like a cult,
and stuff like that.
And in reality, they're just a group that,
I'll hand over to Taiwo here to actually show
who they are in a little bit.
Sorry.
My bad.
And also there is a,
kind of like the,
the perfect example of this is this movie,
Dark Web Cicada 3301,
which is not affiliated with Cicada 3301.
They just, this image in the bottom right,
I don't know who those people are,
but somehow that's who they think Cicada is.
And in reality, they're just...
Those babies are not PTP verified.
Yeah.
Like, I don't know.
I'll hand it over to Taiwo to explain who they actually are.
Thanks, Puck.
There's plenty about who Cicada aren't, isn't.
But I want to talk a little bit about who they are,
or at least...
Oh, thanks.
At least what we know about them.
So basically, they're not supernatural.
They're not some kind of religious cult
or anything out of this world.
But they're somewhere...
One thing is true.
They clearly have an ability
to produce consistently high-quality,
high-complexity puzzles
with clear themes
and very successful motives
to bring people into privacy and cryptography
and also areas such as literature and esoterica as well.
So to put it into kind of rules of thumb,
it's somewhere above like a bunch of neckbeards,
somewhere below a New World Order,
somewhere...
Someone with enough money to purchase infrastructure
and disseminate materials across the globe,
but someone probably or a group less capable
or willing to put probably months into planning something
with no clear financial incentive
or corporate affiliation.
They are clearly well-intentioned.
They're incredibly skilled.
They have basically...
They have very good privacy practice.
Their ability to remain anonymous is second to none.
And they do so whilst also informing the solvers of the puzzle
how to follow in their footsteps
and communicate anonymously, retain privacy online,
and the significance and importance of doing those things.
The puzzles contain many references to esoterica,
and it becomes a strong theme throughout the puzzles as a whole.
But although esoterica does play this core role
to who they kind of personify themselves as,
as of current, although the usage of the esoteric themes
have been used in the solutions of the puzzles to an extent,
they've never been used in a way that is exclusively...
that couldn't have otherwise come about
through intense kind of factual analysis,
things like frequency analysis and things like that.
Yeah, so that's a little bit about who...
about what we really know.
I kind of skipped a point about they're not a criminal organization
and they've come out multiple times
to say that they're not interested in criminal activity
but also to denounce others who claim to be them
committing crimes.
It's happened in the past.
How do we know this?
I defer to my good pal Clockwork.
He's going to tell you a little bit more.
You know, we don't have to guess about who, you know,
who Cicada is, what they're about,
and why they're doing it.
You know, we've heard this straight from the bug's mouth.
In 2012, the round finalists were invited to participate
in collaboration with Cicada.
And they received BGP verified emails
that discussed the who, the what, the why,
if you guys would like.
That QR code leads to our nice little leaked email
on our wiki.
Now here's the key points.
We are an international group.
We are drawn together by common beliefs
that censorship is wrong,
that tyranny and oppression of any kind must end,
and that privacy is an inalienable right.
We are much like a think tank
and the ideas that we advocate are liberty,
privacy, and security.
Excuse me.
We are much like a think tank
in the ways that they research and develop tools
that forward liberty, privacy, and security.
What's interesting to know about the stated goals
of enhancing liberty, privacy, and security
is that this seems to be inspired with
or align with cypherpunk philosophies.
And it's important to know
we are not saying who they are.
This is not a who.
We're saying this seems to be
what they might have been inspired by.
If we look at the cypherpunk manifesto,
you know, privacy is necessary.
It's necessary for an open society
in the electronic age.
Freedom of speech, even more than privacy,
is fundamental to an open society.
Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography
for encryption is fundamentally a private act.
That in this context,
it would appear as though Cicada is indeed inspired by
and gels with this idea
of empowering people to secure their privacy.
There's a part at the end of the cypherpunk manifesto
that says,
for privacy to be widespread,
it must be part of a social contract.
People must come together
and deploy these systems for the common good.
Privacy only extends so far
as the operation of one's fellows in society.
And Cicada is raising awareness
of the deploying of privacy
to the person to your left and right.
It makes people more aware
of what are the threats to their privacy
and what are the tools that they can use to secure it.
I'm going to pass this off
to my good buddy Arturius
to give us a little bit more context
for what happened after the 2012 leaked email.
Thank you, Clockwork.
So, in this speech,
so far we've talked a little bit about
who Cicada 3301 is,
or more accurately,
who they are not.
But let's get down to the meat and potatoes
of the whole internet's hardest mystery thing.
What has Cicada 3301 done
to justify that moniker?
Well, let's start in...
Let's start in 2012.
In 2012,
the unassuming Caesar-shifted
Final.jpg image,
which was found on 4chan's Paranormal Board X,
set off a cacophony.
It led us on a journey of
introductory cryptographic challenges
that included things like
Maya numerals, anagrams,
autostereograms, PGP, RSA,
basically anything that you can think of.
In 2012,
Cicada 3301 upped the ante a little bit.
They departed from the world
of the purely digital
and ventured into real life.
Rather than just making a step
that was only
confined to the internet,
in 2012,
across four continents,
more than a dozen major cities
across the world,
posters,
posters containing Cicada 3301's logo
and a QR code that could be scanned
to lead to the next step,
were found,
flabbergasting the solving community worldwide.
Somehow,
in 2013,
they one-upped themselves again.
They started introducing thematic elements
and philosophical stylings
into these cryptographic challenges.
They really defined for themselves
how the world would view them in 2013.
They created their own operating system.
They wrote, produced, and released
various pieces of encrypted music.
And to top it off,
in 2013,
they gave us the Gematria Primus.
If anybody here does not know
what a Gematria is,
it's essentially just an easy way
to correlate numerical values
to a given character set
or, in our case,
a set of 29 Futhark runes.
This Gematria Primus was then used in 2014
when the release,
the slow release throughout the 2014 year
of 17 pages of what could only be,
what could only be described as
a digital illuminated manuscript
complete with rubrication,
delimiters, marginalia,
anything that you could want
from an illuminated manuscript.
We also had to brute force
an RSA key multiple times.
But even this,
despite those monumental achievements,
despite those monumental achievements,
that was not even the culmination
of the difficulty of Cicada 3301's challenges.
To talk a little bit more
about what's considered possibly
3301's masterpiece,
a deviously fiendishly difficult thing,
I'll let Taiwo,
I'll let Taiwo come speak about it.
Thanks all.
So, yeah.
After these three years
of incredibly well-crafted puzzle steps,
we find ourselves at the most recent,
as we mentioned earlier,
unsolved stage of the puzzle.
You can see that the previous stages
were nothing to kind of joke about,
but I want to talk a little bit about
the level of complexity we're talking about
with why it's been, what, nine years now
since the release of the pages
and we still haven't made,
well, very much progress.
I'll go over that.
So basically at the end of the 2014 puzzles,
a...
Oh.
At the end of 2014,
a set of 58 runic pages were released,
the complexity of which were very clearly
and obviously to solvers at the time
significantly greater than what had
came up until that point.
The puzzle was attacked from every angle.
Obviously the attempt at decrypting
the contents of the runes,
but also investigating the contents
of the image files themselves
and trying to analyze the images
contained within the marginalia of the pages.
You can see some examples here.
The last of these 58 pages up until now,
only two of which have been solved.
They were almost immediately solved
after the release of the pages.
The ultimate page was solved
almost disappointingly with a direct translation
into English,
but again disappointingly gave no clear instruction
as to how to continue.
The penultimate page,
infamously page 56,
the deep web hash page,
was solved in a somewhat more complex way.
A totient stream of...
A totient stream cipher,
a running key of consecutive prime numbers
using Fs as...
Using F runes as interrupters.
The contents of the page instructs us
to search the deep web for a hash,
a 512-bit hash,
and something that we originally presumed,
SHA-512 as many of you may be thinking,
but have gone on to establish multiple potential algorithms
that could have been used
as the definition of the hash remains
undefined by the pages themselves.
In 2017,
the search naturally
scoured the dark web as well.
The Tor network was something
that they've used frequently in the past.
In 2017, the search
discovered a vulnerability in the Tor network,
something that basically
undermined the anonymity and privacy
of the entire protocol
to disclose unlisted hidden services
the moment that they're broadcasted to the network
without being indexed.
This search piqued the interest
of basically security researchers
at the Northeastern University
who had an open investigation
running multiple honeypot onion services
dubbed Hunions.
I thought that was funny.
And they identified the search
as a large-scale attack on the Tor network.
However,
despite being able to identify
and hash approximately 90%
of the hidden services available
at that time,
indexed or not,
nothing of value,
nothing was found that hashed
to the aforementioned hash.
Since then,
broader strokes have been applied
going into the more generous definition
of deep web,
searching pages on the clear net
that haven't been indexed by search engines.
Tools were created
to search multiple hashes
using tools that were created
by the community,
a browser extension named 3301 hash alarm.
You may download that yourselves.
To help the effort with no input from yourself,
it automatically hashes every page you visit
and privately informs you
whether or not you found the deep web hash
and instructs you on how to notify us of that.
I'll hand it over to
Artorias to talk a little bit more
about the community that we constructed
to create such tools
that help the search for the deep web hash.
Thank you.
Thank you, Taiwo.
We are currently going through these slides
a small amount too slowly,
so this one's going to be a little quicker.
It's just an intro
to our community.
Basically, the Cicada Solvers community
is the largest, most organized,
most well-known group of individuals
still actively trying to make progress
in 3301's current step,
Libra Primus.
Despite tens of thousands
of failed solving attempts
by the same number
of previously enthusiastic solvers,
very little progress has been made.
A decade of stagnation can be difficult,
yet we are still actively pursuing
what can be considered an impossible task,
or at least extremely difficult.
To talk a little bit more
about how the Cicada Solvers community
came into being
and a little bit about the evolution
throughout the years of this community,
I'll hand it right back to Taiwo.
Hello again.
So, just let me tell you,
apparently really quickly,
about how this community came to be.
So, as mentioned earlier,
the puzzle...
Next slide.
The puzzle began on 4chan,
already a discussion forum,
but not exactly the best place
for constructive...
progress to be made.
So, we quickly garnered the attention,
the complexity and intricacy of the puzzles
garnered the attention
of the active ARG solving community
inhabiting the Freenode IRC.
Soon thereafter, an IRC channel was created
of our own, dubbed Cicada Solvers.
This naturally became the central hub
of solving attempts,
gaining the reputation
for a public approach to solving,
where all information was shared.
And if you weren't sharing information,
well then,
what are you doing here?
However,
as the IRC channel was started in 2012,
the release of the LP in 2014,
as mentioned previously,
gave Solvers such a humbling
that the fairly active,
for Freenode IRC,
400 members around its peak,
was decimated,
over the years,
to around 5 to 10 active users.
At the time,
the operators and moderators
of the Cicada Solvers IRC
came together to stop the community
from dying out.
There were many things considered,
but at the time,
Discord was becoming very popular
and also very controversial
in the privacy and security community.
The irony of Discord being
a proprietary platform
that makes money predominantly
by selling all of your information
is not lost on us,
however,
the free and scalable nature
of the platform,
the set of convenient tools
that it provides,
and also the,
I can't remember the last one,
Discord was what we ended up going with,
but with years of experience
managing the community,
we knew what would stick
and what wouldn't,
how people could succeed
and what led people to fail.
So we set to construct a set
of guidelines that we should follow
to create a community that is
constructed specifically towards
the successful accomplishment
of an almost impossible task
with very little definition
of progress over the years.
To describe a little bit more
about what sets us apart,
I'm going to hand you over to,
probably Clockwork,
there it is.
Clockwork indeed,
probably me indeed.
So what makes us different
from,
you know,
what makes us stand out
from the total solving community
is that we are dedicated
to sharing everything.
That, you know,
whatever,
whatever someone does,
you know,
it's all about a community
of sharing,
of collaborating.
Gatekeeping is the death
of collaboration.
So ensuring that we can create
a community where people feel open
and engaged
and really have fun with it
is one of our goals.
And as was mentioned earlier,
what differentiates us
from fake puzzle communities
is that no PGP,
no Cicada.
It's that simple.
And, you know,
there are people who have had,
you know,
that might say,
oh, you're gatekeeping,
da, da, da.
No.
I mean,
you saw that book of 58,
you know,
cryptic pages.
We have enough to worry about.
I don't have,
you know,
having to go about
following some weird goose chase
versus a decoy duck chase.
So what's also important
is that we have clear guidelines,
clear rules,
clear rules of conduct,
not only for our users
but for our staff members.
You know,
ways that we want people
to engage with users
in order to educate them,
to help them grow,
productive ways of giving feedback
that's a style of workshopping
versus critiquing
and saying someone is wrong.
Something else is that,
as I said,
we have a guide.
You know,
that it's,
that we've all been in a place
that it's incredibly overwhelming
to be faced with
that much information
and have to learn it all.
Something else is that
we try to document
what worked
and what didn't work.
And that's important.
You know,
you look in other communities
and we don't,
we don't see
that same level
of documentation.
And that's the nice thing
about Cicada Solvers
is that if you want to know,
all right,
what has someone done
about cryptanalysis
regarding,
you know,
you know,
key,
like auto key
or,
you know,
visionary
or this,
that,
and the other thing,
you can find it
easily.
And it's important
because,
you know,
even if you're not going to be active,
you don't have to be active
in the community.
But if you just want to know,
if you just want that material,
you can find it.
So,
I am going to pass it off
to our main art
to discuss our main challenges.
To our art.
Yes,
there you go.
So,
some of our main challenges
as a community.
You can see up here,
documentation,
fake puzzles,
and the revolving door culture
of new solvers
coming in,
getting exhausted
with failed attempts,
leaving,
rejoining,
wondering
if there's been
any progress.
There hasn't,
so they leave again.
I want to talk
a little bit
about
why
documentation
is so hard.
First of all,
documenting a failed attempt
at anything
is not something
that many people
are very willing
or enthusiastic
to do.
Not only failed attempts,
but even successful attempts.
If you do not
document them properly,
if they're not reproducible,
if the methods used
are not
very well explained,
then it's going
to snowball
into
something
to people thinking,
okay,
well,
you say
that this worked.
Can you prove it?
Can you show us?
As far as
documentation platforms go,
we've tried
pretty much everything.
If any of you
have been
to the
Uncovering Cicada
Wikia
slash
fandom,
you'll know
that
it's a bit of a mess.
It's a little bit
of a mess.
I can say
from personal
experience
trying
to create
the website
for
which is
like
not necessarily
a replacement,
but it was
meant to be
an improvement
upon the
Uncovering
Cicada
Wikia.
It's very
hard.
And we've
tried
pretty much
every platform
that you
could think
of.
We've had
Git Hubs,
Git Labs,
Wecans,
Trellos,
and
a lot
Cicada
Wikia
website.
We've
a lot
of
done
on
the
Uncovering
Cicada
Wikia
community.
They try
what they
can,
and inevitably
they get
humbled.
We've all
been there.
None of us
are as smart
as we want
to think
we are.
And after
your attempts
that you
have tried
so hard
concocting,
keep failing
and keep
failing
for a
decade
straight,
you might
eventually
get a little
bit worn
out of
trying.
You leave,
and then
eventually you
get bored
of normal
life.
You hop
back into
the server.
You say,
hey guys,
I haven't
been around
here in a
while.
Has there
been any
progress?
No?
I'll see
you in
another few
years.
That's the
life cycle
of a
solver.
So,
to make
a small
departure
from our
challenges,
I'm going
to let
Puck here
discuss some
of our
advantages
as a
community.
All right.
So,
we've
kind of,
over the
years,
we've
learned a
lot,
and we've
kind of
been able
to capitalize
on that.
First thing,
something we
didn't really
have to do
too much
work about,
we kind of
just have a
lot of
people through
different
documentaries over
the years.
They kind of
just filter
in as it
gets popular.
So,
with literally
over 7,000
people,
like a
lot of
people means
there's
going to
be a
lot of
attempts.
It's just
simple math,
and we,
as a result
of that,
we obviously
have a lot
of solving
attempts,
and we have
to kind
of organize
that,
which is
this main
thing,
organization
of man
power.
We kind
of,
we do
these things
called voice
sessions,
which I'll
touch on
in a bit,
and also
something Tyra
will touch on
in a bit,
is active
tool development.
We have a
very big
open source,
like kind
of open
source culture.
Like,
if you're
going to solve
it,
you're going
to need
other people
as well.
So,
we definitely
promote that.
So,
for our
community
size,
generally,
more people,
the better.
It's going
to take
that,
you're going
to say,
I'm a
solver.
There might
be,
there's a
higher chance
that there's
an idea
that I
like,
and I
want to
solve
it.
That's very
important,
because as we
are all
hobbyists,
it's not
really like we
have any
incentive just
to go out
and try
something.
There needs
to be that,
like what's
in it for
us,
and that's
the enjoyment
factor.
And so,
the more
ideas there
are,
the more
likely you
are to
find something
that you
like,
and you're
going to
have more
motivation,
and generally,
that could
turn somebody
who's a
non-solver
into a
solver,
and then it'll
just kind of
keep going
as a result
of that.
And now,
this is kind
of the main
thing we've
developed over
the past
couple of
years.
In December
2019,
there was
a message
in the Discord
server kind
of just saying
can we all
basically just
get into a voice
channel and just
talk about where
we should do
or where we
should go
next,
what solving
attempts we
should run,
and how can we
work on them
together.
And I kind of
took it upon
myself.
I had free
time.
I was still in
high school.
I didn't really
have anything
too important
going on.
And I was like,
sure, I'll just
kind of organize
it.
We'll do some
weekly events.
We'll do some
monthly events.
We'll all get
together.
We'll schedule it.
Everybody can
just set the date
in your calendar.
Come by if you
want.
Don't have to say
anything.
But generally,
we had over
like 25 people
show up at a
time, which is
pretty crazy
because there
were like three
people talking
at a time.
And it was
kind of, it was
a pretty big lull
in the community
at the time.
And we kind
of just turned
these things over
time.
We now have more
hosts because we
have this culture
again, like this
open source culture.
Anybody can be a
part of it.
The more people,
the better.
So we've emphasized
that anybody can do
a voice session.
Some random
person here, if you
want to join to a
voice session, I'd
recommend like reading
the Wiki first.
But sure, go
ahead.
I still haven't
read it.
It's a running joke
of us.
Read the Wiki.
And this big
teaming up on
solving is the big
emphasis of it.
And for tools, I'll
hand it over to
Taiwo.
Hello again.
Really quickly,
this next slide,
previous slide.
Quick
spoiler there.
Really quickly, I
wanted to touch
on the community's
kind of general
efforts on
towards focusing on the
organization of a
community set of tools and
resources.
As we kind of touched
on the cycle of
solvers, a common sort of
landing place for people
who have been in the
community for a long
time, such as myself, is
to focus on the tools
that help others to
succeed.
Sometimes even the
combination of resources
to help other people to
advance their theories or
to try out their theories
as quickly as possible.
Kind of standing on the
shoulders of giants kind of
thing.
Much like you may have
heard of a recent
breakthrough in the
Zodiac 340 cipher.
Solved after 54 years.
Basically through the
creation, the community
creation of custom tools
used specifically for a
custom alphabet.
And we take great
inspiration from this.
One of the main
challenges, however,
similar to the Zodiac
Cypher, is the
utilization of a separate
alphabet.
As described in the
gematria primus, it's 29
runes, but it's more
complicated than meets the
eye and the vast majority of
cryptographic tools just
aren't compatible with the
types of translations that
we have in the Libra
primus.
Basically we have kind of
three main areas of attack.
We've got the deep analysis
tools, almost infinite
levels of configuration.
You could probably
use the
Zodiac 340 cipher.
We spend years learning all of
the different ways to
manipulate these tools in
order to implement your ideas
and kind of follow through
how the process naturally
progresses and to come up
with basically to inspire
yourself to continue with
even more further ideas.
The second area is more of
like a middling area.
If you have a quick idea,
we work on tools that allow
you to rapidly throw things
to the ground.
Things like Discord bots that
just let you quickly test out
a theory, Python libraries that
allow you to just remove all of
the context of the different
ciphers and ways of using them
and just saying, I wonder if
it's a visionary shift with
this key, but on the runes, but
also skipping the interrupting
the F characters as is
frequent in the puzzles.
Generally and then the final
area of focus is on the sort
of external non-technical area.
Tools that are
widely adoptable.
Things that require basically
no input and that we can
disseminate among large groups
of people such as the browser
extension that was mentioned
previously.
It's
generally our goal as a
community to unify our
resources and that's how we
plan on kind of moving forward
with this.
Speaking of moving forward
with it, I'm passing it over to
Artorias, my guy.
Artorias, my guy.
Speaking of moving forward with
it, the theme of this DEFCON is
the future will prevail.
We believe that the Cicada
Solvers community embodies this
spirit and the lessons we've
learned pursuing a nigh
impossible goal can be
something extremely valuable to
anyone who wants to see a future
of digital liberty, privacy and
security rights.
I want to add in our experience
over the years we've seen many
people be influenced and go into
and be influenced by this puzzle
and it affects their lives.
Solving is a learning process.
They're learning how to solve.
People are introduced to the
fields of cyber security,
infosec, cryptography, and
computer science.
Fields that are actively shaping
our future.
In trying to solve a bug book,
people end up in fields that are
solving the problems of the
future.
Art?
As something of a closing
comment on this idea, I would
like to say thank you to the
Cicada Solvers community.
The future will prevail because
we're all building it right now.
It's not a matter of predicting
what may or may not come.
It's about taking active steps
to ensure a future that is good
to live in.
Not only for yourself, but for
the people around you and the
people you care about.
Look to your left and to your right.
That person's understanding of a future,
understanding and concept of security and privacy is just as important to your safety
as your own. One last thing I would like to say is that if you want more detail about
how the actual stages throughout 2012, 2013, and 2014 were solved, we will be speaking at
Crypto and Privacy Village at the Flamingo, 4 p.m. tomorrow. We're going to get very deep
into the history of the actual way that these challenges were solved. Thank you.
Thank you.