MegaEncryption (TM) - 40 points

Writeup by Valar_Dragon

Problem

Personal Advancement of Cuil Therory Foundation

The Personal Advancement of Cuil Therory Foundation (PACTF) left a message for Tony, but they used MegaEncryption (TM) to encrypt it. What did they say? Should we be worried? It seems like they used some sort of public medium to send the message…

Solution

Someone left an encrypted message for wikipedia user Tony, and they used a public medium to do so. The perfect place to do this would be Tony's talk page, so lets check the history of the talk page!

Navigate here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Tony_Tan&action=history

What revision to look at is rather obvious.

We see:

#Super Secret Mega Encrypted Message

Hey Tony, I've got a super secret message for you! I had to use MegaEncryption (TM) to encrypt it, though. I speak on behalf of the Personal Advancement of Cuil Therory Foundation (PACTF). See my MegaEncrypted message below.

[20KB Base64 string that is too big to fit here, see megaEncrypted.txt]

This is clearly a base64 encoded message, because its all printable with no special characters, and ends in two equal signs. But its massive. So lets put it in a file called megaEncrypted.txt

If we do:

$ cat megaEncrypted.txt | base64 -d

we get another massive base64 message. We can keep on piping more base64's until we get the message at the end.

$ cat megaEncrypted.txt | base64 -d |
 base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d| base64 -d | base64 -d| base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d | base64 -d
Oh my goodness! It's gotten so bad. The cuils are rising... they want to outlaw encryption... I'd rate their world +200 Cuils! At least I have MegaEncryption (TM) to keep me safe. the_cuil_is_too_much_to_handle

If you scroll all the way to the right, you see the flag: the_cuil_is_too_much_to_handle

Challenge could more accurately be called MegaEncoded :P