The Rosetta Protocol Part I: The Stone Awakens

It began in the British Museum's conservation lab, deep in the heart of London. A new digitization project had just been completed on one of the world's most iconic artifacts: the Rosetta Stone. Unlike past scans, this one used cutting-edge multispectral imaging to reveal surface details invisible to the naked eye.

Amina Noor, a postdoc researcher in cryptographic anthropology, had been monitoring checksum anomalies reported in the scan logs. When she analyzed the image on her secured terminal, she found something no one had expected: patterned pixel anomalies recurring at regular intervals across the Demotic script panel. It wasn’t noise. It was a message.

Sharing her suspicions with an underground cryptography forum, Amina soon attracted attention. One user, alias "NilusRoot," hinted that the anomalies were part of a modern LSB steganography algorithm but designed to trigger only under UV exposure. The forum exploded with speculation—had someone embedded modern data into a 2,000-year-old stone?

The stone had not changed - the scan had. Amina focused on extracting the hidden payload. CTF Challenge 1: Image Steganography Task: Analyze the provided and use LSB steganography techniques to extract the hidden message embedded in UV-reactive regions. The flag is embedded as plaintext.

Hint: Use a tool like zsteg or stegsolve, or https://georgeom.net/StegOnline/upload to analyze LSB data in the red channel. Focus on the top-left 16x16 pixels where the flag is embedded. Extract LSB from the red channel and convert to ASCII to retrieve flag.

Download Challenge Image

The Rosetta Protocol CTF Portal

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Part II