Hey - I’m Kevin (past friends call me Heavy K). Philosophy made my path interesting, and my hobbies keep me busy: amateur astronomy, shortwave radio, and retro-gaming. I love Gödel, Escher, Bach and a bit of Tolkien - and my wife and daughter mean everything to me.
I just dug up a stack of 5.25" floppies from my college days and found an old Commodore 64 disk with a mysterious BASIC program on it - a real digital time capsule. Back then 64KB felt like an ocean; people got creative in tiny spaces.
Task: Run the disk image, inspect the BASIC program, and hunt for the flag. Take your time - old-school programmers hid things cleverly. You’ll recognize the flag by a Christmas phrase that pays.
This BASIC stores a password and a secret message (our FLAG) in an encoded form, using XOR with the constant value 7.
Security-wise, the XOR method is extremely weak. XOR is reversible as the same operation that encrypts also decrypts. With a fixed single-byte key (7), we can recover the password or flag just by applying XOR 7 again to the stored data. We use the recipe XOR with a key 7 in CyberChef.
CTF{frost-plan:compressors,coolant,oil}
Correct password:
C64RULES