The intranet of the company Difax is the third and final component of the ARG.
It is where the staff members can communicate with each other as well as get get information through their company.
The website consists of several different pages accessible from a menu at the top of the screen. There are the Home, Company, Documents, Human Resources , News, and Quiz pages, see figure 3.6. Each of these currently displays a minimal amount of information. The Home page gives a short welcome to the website in the form of a single sentence. The Company Page shows the current stock rate for the company. The Documents page gives five buttons which each leads to a separate policy document for the company. The HR page shows the human relations appointed staff members and the way to contact them. The News page gives a short feed on the recent company news for the staff members. One example of this is how the company is going on its annual retreat. The last page has a short quiz that staff members can perform and earn a reward at the end of the week.
3.4.1 Document Puzzle
This puzzle is using underlined keywords in the different policy documents which is used to open up a small console window by pressing certain keyboard keys or letters in the title. In the console window, codes can be entered. When the correct code is entered it unlocks and takes the user to a new page with a big console window.
The correct code can be found on the quiz page.
3.4.2 Console Puzzle
The puzzle is a continuation where the document puzzle left off. It is similar to the standard windows console . It has different commands the player can use to show different information. The puzzle is that the player is first supposed to unlock admin access by typing in the admin command with the admin code. The code can be found in one of the news posts.
After unlocking admin access a new command can be found ’/changePassword [user]’
where the player can change the password of selected accounts. After typing this command with the CEO account name, the player is required to first answer 3 security questions before being able to change the account’s password. The answers to these questions are spread out across the different pages of website.
The first question ’Name of pet’ can be found in one of the questions on the quiz page. The second question ’Name of favorite movie villain’ is related to the company name Difax which is a Latin word meaning ’two-faced’ referring to the villain Two-Face. The third question ’Hometown’ can be found in one of the pictures in the news page. The picture shows the hometown of the CEO. Using google reverse image search the user can get the name of the city.
(a) Home page of company intranet web-site.
(b) Company page of company intranet website.
(c) Documents page of company intranet website.
(d)HR page of company intranet website.
(e) News page of company intranet web-site.
(f)Quiz page of company intranet website.
Figure 3.6: Figure showing the Home page (a), the Company page (b), the Doc-uments page (c), the HR page (d), the News page (e) and the Quiz page (f) of the company intranet.
3.4.3 Cipher Puzzle
This puzzle is quite simple to understand. It only includes a cipher that has to be solved when trying to login into the CEO’s account. The user has 60 seconds to solve before a new cipher is shown. The cipher is based on a Caesar shift cipher it is a type of cipher in which each letter in the message is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a left shift of 3, D would be replaced by A, E would become B, and so on.
3.4.4 Encrypted Archive Puzzle
After the user has logged into the CEO account, the documents page now has a locked archive text and accompanying lock image which when pressed presents a small console window where a key is requested. This key can be found inside the CEO profile picture. By downloading the image and opening it using a file manager such as ’winrar’ it shows that it contains a txt file named ’key.txt’ where the key is stored.
Testing
Testing is vital to creating a successful product [23]. It balances the most important aspects of the ARG: the difficulty and level of fun. One puzzle is not supposed to take hours to complete nor seconds, rather somewhere in between. This aspect is very difficult to get right on the first iteration, so testing is needed if we want to attract as many people as possible. Since there will be a need for lots of frequent tests, our solution was to separate the project group into multiple smaller groups that each create their own puzzles. These smaller groups then test it with the other groups. This provides us with very fast feedback which is important as the scope of the whole project is large and time efficiency is critical.
A list of questions and answers will be used to keep track of data obtained during testing. The template for this survey can be found in appendix A. All questions will remain the same during all tests to keep the data as accurate as possible. The answers we get back from our group members will affect how the puzzles evolves or if they need to be removed. The puzzles had to be tested to make sure that they are as bug free as possible, to ensure that the puzzles were well tested, testers from outside the developing group.