Stone Age Read Free

Internet Relay Chat group where he often communicated with fellow hacker-friends.  Most were twenty-something like him.  By the time that he tried to follow the trail, it had grown cold.  He wrote the algorithm to scour the Internet in hopes that it would appear again.  His efforts paid off.
    Arguably, his interest in this was due to a gene passed down to him by his father, John, who founded two successful Internet-based companies, the second called Picshare made his family wealthy.  Steve, like his father, was an IT person by vocation, founding his own digital security company prior to beginning high school.  However, his skills for this test were spawned by his long-time passion for hacking and cryptography.
    “Okay, what is hidden in this image then?” he asked out loud, considering his next move in this chess-like game.  He reasoned that it must use some form of digital steganography, the concealing of secret information within a digital file.  He started picking apart the pixels using an open source program he loved using.  He ran different combinations, adjusting the color of every first pixel, and then second, and so on.  On the fiftieth pixel combination, the image changed and revealed writing.  There was a reference to “Tiberius Claudius Caesar” and a line of seemingly meaningless letters.  He deduced it must be a Caesar cipher, an encryption technique used for private correspondence by its namesake Julius.  He also knew this as a shift cipher, one of the most widely known encryption techniques, consisting of substituting or “shifting” letters in a message with corresponding letters some number of positions down the alphabet.  Since Tiberius Claudius was the fourth Caesar in Rome, Steve reasoned that for every letter in the meaningless jumble of letters, he would substitute a letter four letters forward in the alphabet.  This gave him a web address, which he entered into his browser, excited to see what it would reveal.
    “Nuts,” he said disappointed.  It was a picture of a duck with the following text:
    Whoops.
    Just a decoy this way.  Looks like you can’t guess how to get the message out.”
    “Okay, you don’t fool me that easily.  I’m guessing your duck message is a literal clue,” continuing his conversation with the screen’s author.
    He opened his trusted OutGuess program, which helped him in cracking many similar encryption codes.  With this, he found another hidden message, which linked him to a message board on Reddit:
    -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
    Hash: SHA1
    Welcome again.
     
    Here is a book code.  To find the book, break this riddle:
     
    A book whose study is forbidden
    Once dictated to a beast;
    To be read once and then destroyed
    Or you shall have no peace.
     
     
    I:1:6; I:2:15; I:3:26; I:5:4; I:6:15; I:10:26:; I:14:136; I:15:68; I:16:42; I:18:17; I:19:14; I:20:58; I:21:10; I:22:8; I:23:6; I:25:17; I:26:33; I:27:30; I:46:32; I:47:53; I:49:209; I:50:10; I:51:115; I:52:39; I:53:4; I:62:43; I:63:8; III:19:84; III:20:10; III:21:11; ; III:22:3; III:23:58; 5; I:1:3; I:2:15; I:3:6; I:14:17; I:30:68; I:60:11; II:49:84; II:50:50; II:64:104; II:76:3; II:76:3; 0; I:60:11
     
    Good luck.
     
    3301
     
    Steve remembered hearing this poem once.  He searched for a few minutes, using various parts of the poem.  By accident, he ran across a similar poem, which pointed to the book, Liber AL vel Legis by Alester Crowley, also known as The Book of Law .
    Deducing that the rest of the message pointed to different lines in each chapter of the book, he found a web address for a Dropbox.  He entered this and downloaded the 130MB file, some sort of .iso image. 
    “This is getting interesting,” again, speaking out loud to no one but himself.
    When booting from the image, a series of numbers started to appear, one after another on his screen.
    2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19…
    “Ahhhh.  Prime numbers,” he said while watching his screen.
    The prime numbers continued to appear in