Silver Objective

For this first challenge, we’re given the hint we’ll need a book to solve the puzzle. Exploring around the front yard, we find a copy of “The Night Before Christmas” lying in the snow not far from the keypad. But there wasn’t any obvious highlighting or formatting that told me the code.

I then looked at the keypad itself and noticed a sticky note in the upper left hand corner.

Being a National Treasure fan, I recognized this as an Ottendorf cipher where the code 2:6:1 meant the second page, sixth word on that page, and first letter of that word.

So going from left to right, top to bottom, I got the code SANTA. But that’s letters and not numbers which led me to the T9 alphabet that maps the alphabet to digits

From there, I used the code 72682 and got a lot of shredded paper that needed to be restored but that puzzle was for another challenge.

Gold Objective

In the hard level, we were given the hint to use a UV light to find what numbers were actually used. Once again digging around in the snow, I found the UV light and figured out the digits 2, 6, 7, and 8 were used. I decided to write a quick python script to brute force the keypad rather than manually type in the results. Below is the script with comments on nuances.

import requests
import time
import json
import sys

# assume five digits only since the silver objective used five digits
i = 22678
max_num = 88762
array_of_nums = ['2', '6', '7', '8']

while i <= max_num:
  temp = str(i)
  check_pass = 0

  if i != '72682': # added this check so we don't test the code we already know
    for num in array_of_nums:
      if num in temp:
        check_pass += 1
        temp = temp.replace(num, '')

  if (check_pass == 4) & (temp == ''): # only run a check if all four numbers are present without any others
    payload = json.dumps({'answer': f"{i}"})
    response = requests.post('https://hhc24-frostykeypad.holidayhackchallenge.com/submit?id=1ec9fa3f-6b4d-421b-b2e3-288ea40bb717', data=payload, headers={"Content-Type": "application/json"})
    if "error" not in response.text: # if we get a successful message, stop testing other codes
      print(f"{i}: {response.text}")
      sys.exit()
    else: # this else statement is only here so i know the script is working
      print(f"{i}: {response.text}")
    time.sleep(1) # there's a throttle limit of one request per second
  i += 1

Answer: 22786