Frosty Keypad

In the North West corner of The Front Yard in Act I is the Frosty Keypad terminal challenge. Chat with Morcel Nougat to get info about this challenge. It seems like Santa is away from the North Pole for the time being and Alabaster Snowball and Wombly Cube have taken charge. A document that is necessary for the operation of a device called "Santa's Little Helper" has been shredded and we need to access the document peices by opening the Shredder McShreddin 9000. To do this we will need to crack the Frosty Keypad.

Morcel mentioned something about a book holding they key to this challenge.

I've noticed that some elves keep referring to a certain book when they walk by. I bet it has the answers we need to crack the code and recover the document!"

Looking around there is a book on the ground to the right of the Frosty Keypad. Behind the stack of boxes near the Frosty Keypad, there is also a UV Flashlight. This may also come in handy.

The Frosty Keypad has a note on it that has a series of numbers.

This in along with the hint about the book indicates we can find the code using the book and numbers as an Ottendorf cipher. This type of cipher uses a book as a key. The numbers represent a page, word, and letter in the book. The book can be located here: Frosty Book

Code	Page	Word	Letter
2:6:1	2	6th Word: SNUG	S
4:19:3	4	19th Word: WHAT	A
6:1:1	6	First Word: NOW	N
3:10:4	3	10th Word: CLATTER	T
14:8:3	14	8th Word: TEAM	A

The cipher revealed the code "SANTA", but how to convert this word into a numerical code? The UV Flashlight helps here by showing some fingerprints on the keypad that reveal the last pressed numbers.

The fingerprints are on numbers 2,6,7,8. These numbers on a telephone keypad correspond to the numbers for SANTA. So using this logic, SANTA would be code "72682". Enter this code to solve the Easy mode for this challenge and get the Silver trophy.

After completing the Easy mode for this challenge, Morcel mentions that the 2nd code may require a few more tries, indicating there may be some brute forcing involved.

I manually submitted some guesses on the keypad and noticed that an incorrect guess resulted in a 400 status code, a valid guess (e.g. 72682) resulted in a 200 status code, and if I submitted several guesses in succession the server responded with a 429 "Too Many Requests" status code.

{"error": "Too many requests from this User-Agent. Limited to 1 requests per 1 seconds."}

The error message indicates we are limited to 1 request per second. This doesn't bother me that much because with the keyspace, there are only 1024 possible 5 number permutations of the numbers 2,6,7,8. The worst case scenario is 17 minutes of brute forcing as 1 request per second. I wrote a python script to make these requests for me. You can download the whole script here: frostykeypad_brute.py

The script calculates the next guess and then submits it as a POST request to "https://hhc24-frostykeypad.holidayhackchallenge.com/submit". If it checks the response for a 200 and then after a 1 second sleep, it moves on to the next guess.

λ py frostykeypad_brute.py
1: Attempting guess [22222]...Failure
2: Attempting guess [22226]...Failure
3: Attempting guess [22227]...Failure
4: Attempting guess [22228]...Failure
...
43: Attempting guess [22777]...Failure
44: Attempting guess [22778]...Failure
45: Attempting guess [22782]...Failure
46: Attempting guess [22786]...Success
Done

Luckily I didn't have to wait very long. Guess 46 of "22786" was correct. If the supplied RID parameter is correct, then the challenge will be completed in your badge. If not, then just type this manually into the Frosty Keypad in the game.

This whole objective is reminiscent of the film National Treasure, with the UV fingerprints. Anywho, Morcel instructs us to take the news and the shredded peices of paper to Jewel Loggins for the next challenge.