Cipher Saga is an online cryptic hunt event hosted during EPITOME, the annual techno-management fest of Gati Shakti Vishwavidyalaya. Participants tackle a series of challenging levels, deciphering clues and solving riddles to progress. This tests their wit, collaboration, and problem-solving skills, which will leave everyone thrilled and eager for more.

Cryptic hunts are like treasure hunts, but online. They require you to hunt the internet for clues and hints to solve given questions. Cipher coders, AI tools, QR codes, coding softwares, etc. are all allowed and to be used. You do not require any coding knowledge to win one, but it always helps!

• Use your college id to register
• Make sure you have registered on the platform to GET A TASTE OF CIPHER SAGA.
• Reverse engineering the platform means direct ban from the competition. Bugs if found should be reported and not exploited. Exploiting a bug also leads to disqualification.
• By playing the game, you adhere to agree to all the rules above.
• Now, Just say Game On

• All answers are lower case without any special characters like space, "?", "/", etc. Don't worry though, we normalize your inputs anyways! Answer may contain digits though!
• File passwords are all lower case without any special characters. We do not normalize this. So be wary while you enter file passwords. Passwords may contain digits though!
• Stay aware for in platform hints. They could take you far in the game.
• Every clue in the question is important. If it wasn't important, it wouldn't be there.
• Beware of the spelling you enter, we do not autocorrect.

Note: Not all tools and approaches are listed below. Read these to get you through some of the levels. But tougher levels requires much more brain power and tools not listed here may also be used.

Cryptic hunts generally revolve around tech, trivia, pop culture, and mostly anything you can find on the internet. Googling is allowed and heavily encouraged, but it won't directly get you the answer in most cases. Think logically, make connections between different parts of levels. Make sure you check the source of the webpage for any hints hidden there. Cryptic hunts are all about connecting the dots and finding the solutions.

The levels will basically consist of a set of clues, all which link to ONE ANSWER. The difficulty is random. You can expect questions of any difficulty at any level.

When you get two or more clues, try to connect them and find an interrelated clue from it.

If you can't figure out the hint, try breaking it down and solving it in parts.

You will usually find clues in the following places (Look for them carefully, and try discovering more yourself):

• The hunt's site: Clues are sometimes hidden in the hunt's rules and maybe even in the event descriptions. If you get a blank document as a clue try using tools as some of the hunts hide the clue by camouflaging it. The page title. The URL. Focus on every word carefully as almost every hunt uses a lot of wordplay.
• Images: Name of the image file can be very helpful. Dimensions of the image can provide hints. Strings can be hidden in the metadata of the images. Steganography is frequently used. Steganography is a technique of hiding information within another image, invisible to the naked eye to avoid detection. Changing contrast, color schemes, brightness etc.can also help. Headers or the file type may have issues, correcting/changing them is a common technique. Online tools like aperisolve can be used along.
• Backlinks: Backlinks are very important aspects of hunts and are also almost always used in hunts. For images, the most famous backlink site is imgur.com. pastebin.com is also a very famous backlink site, it is used for storing clues. Sometimes, the pastebin can be password encrypted, in that case, we need to find a clue that fits the password. bit.ly is a famous URL shortener used along withtinyurl.com (which can have a name as a backlink) Another used backlink site is imgflip.com If you are not able to figure out which site the backlink belongs to, you can always go to a backlink identifier such as a4x.me. Sometimes the backlinks are also encrypted.