AND!XOR B.E.N.D.E.R

Welcome to our 10th year of building indie electronic badges for hacker summer camp shenanigans. This year’s [DEF CON 33] badge features a Pepper’s Ghost hologram, custom acrylic, and mirrors. Unlike traditional CTFs, our contest starts with a mystery: contestants receive a .z5 file, which is a Z Machine Interactive Fiction game. Once loaded in a Z Machine emulator (like dfrotz), players enter a text-based world inspired by Zork, with 84 unique areas, dozens of NPCs, and artifacts. We call this format Badge Enabled Non Directive Enigma Routine (BENDER) - a text adventure CTF that blends digital puzzles with real-world hardware hacking.

The goal: OSINT your way through BENDER’s digital world, discover the challenges, solve them, and interact with 5n4ck3y-the IoT Hacked Vending Machine. Many challenges require direct interaction with 5n4ck3y and its peripherals, while others are offline to avoid excessive lines. Solve enough challenges, and 5n4ck3y vends a badge. You can stop there or continue for more points.

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BENDER is a text based CTF front which masquerades as a text based adventure game, similar to Zork, Collosal Cave, etc. The player interacts by typing commands for navigating the world map, taking items, using items, and looking at things/places. It has evolved in many ways over the years. This year we are using an Inform6 form, PunyInform, as the framework. Essentially the hacker is performing OSINT on an entire game world, to figure out what the challenges are, how to solve them, and then solving them.