haKC.Codes - gold PCB raven above a green LED hex

Multi-stage crypto puzzles that track every solve, hint, and second you burn. The leaderboard doesn't lie, and neither do your split times.

Enter play.hakc.codes
$ ssh recruit@hakc.codes
Archived games
3
Total solves
120
Minted coins
23
Email prizes
23
Era
2014-2023

// 23 LORE

Every stage, cipher, and dead link the old games left behind - preserved here so nothing rots twice. Three archived games. Load the boards, read the writeups, hear the WAV.

01

23 COINS

2014-2023 · haKC / 23 CODES · multi-year
23 Coins - Coin 0 minted face 23 Coins - Coin 1 minted face 23 Coins - Coin 2 minted face

Three physical challenge coins - Coin 0, Coin 1, Coin 2 - each a self-contained puzzle you solved from the coin art alone. Rank 0 was the whole point: people fought for first blood, and rank 23 got nothing but a line of text with your name on the board.

The prize was scarcity you could hold. Twenty-three of each coin were physically minted; claiming a slot took one of them off the table. Coin 0 alone logged 28 phrase solvers and 4 who ran it all the way to complete.

Open board PRIZE: 23 MINTED COINS
02

23isREAL

github.com/23isreal · audio + ROT13 chain
KEY 0 · STAGE-0 WAV · THIS IS THE PUZZLE
RIFF/WAVE · 8-bit mono PCM · 8000 Hz · "who>who"

The prize was one of 23 real @23isreal.com email addresses. Two boards tracked it: "The 23" (ordinals 0-22, the winners) and "The 23'd" - the overflow board, where solving past the slots earned a line of text and no address.

Stage 0 was the audio above - decode the WAV to move on. Stage 1 was a ROT13 string that resolved to a cryptobin.co URL. That link is dead now, and stage 2 died with it. That link rot is exactly why this platform exists: every asset now lives on hakc.codes, byte-for-byte, forever.

@zfasel solved the whole thing and declined his slot - rank -1 on the board, "Solved for Funsies - Did not collect."

Open board PRIZE: 23 EMAIL ADDRESSES
03

SecKC PWN2WIN 2014

CrypticBurrs · September 2014 · Android RE
Pwn2Win cipher.png overlay tile
cipher.png
Pwn2Win stream.jpeg steghide carrier
stream.jpeg
Pwn2Win cake.jpeg - final steghide carrier
cake.jpeg

A SecKC monthly Android reverse-engineering challenge. Install the app, decode the morse in an NFC tag, steghide the stream, overlay cipher.png to recover a key, then XOR the app's string to reach Key 1. The answer was SecKCake.

The Google Play store link is long dead. The original APK - v1.3.3.7 - is hosted here now, alongside every carrier image in the chain. The full artifact set is preserved so the puzzle stays solvable.

Open board PRIZE: THE ANDROID APK