Hey HN, HackMIT organizers here. This is the 2017 admissions puzzle! It contains a variety of security, AI, and RE challenges. If you're an undergrad and are one of the first 50 people to complete it you get automatic admission to HackMIT!
If you start playing, feel free to join the Slack! Link is on the command center.
In case it is not obvious ( for me it wasn't ), you can only acceess the puzzle through github login button.
Registering doesn't give you access to the puzzle.
Thanks for pointing that out, my first thought was the goal is to decode a bit pattern from the flickering neon sign mp4! That would have been some wasted time...
That was definitely my first instinct. I got as far as the morse code decrypts to "NETE" before coming back here to check if I was doing something wildly wrong.
Something about unix time? Isn't the earliest moment in unix time around December 1900? Epoch - 2^31 seconds? I'm betting it's something about that plus some tricky nonsense I don't have the energy figuring out (assuming that I could). I guess spoiler alert...
I used to love puzzles like this when I was younger, but I think I've lost the patience for them now.
The puzzles are similar to the ones on https://cryptopals.com. The first one involved a combination of caesar cipher and running a jar file. The second one looks to be related to timing attack.
The target audience for this is college kids, who these days frequently use GitHub for consuming course material (e.g. boilerplate for class assignments). Doesn't seem like a bad move on their part to avoid rolling their own account system. People like one-click auth.
If you start playing, feel free to join the Slack! Link is on the command center.