Frequency 3000 — DawgCTF '26

Description

One of my favorite TV shows of all time has to be Futurama. I decided to hide a message that can be solved by frequenting its pilot episode. Good luck and remember to drink lots of Slurm, 'it's highly addictive!'

English summary: the challenge ships a transcript for Futurama's pilot episode, Space Pilot 3000, plus a flag.txt file containing hex bytes. The goal is to decode the hex, interpret the resulting numbers as frequency values, and recover the hidden message from the transcript.

Analysis

The first useful step is to inspect flag.txt. It is not plaintext, but a list of hexadecimal byte values. Decoding those bytes produces:

DawgCTF{ 390 1002 580 1314 191 1589 33 1526 141 762 352 88 1293 379 50 }

So the inner payload is a sequence of integers, not the flag itself.

The prompt makes the intended direction very clear:

• "Futurama"
• "pilot episode"
• "frequenting"

Those clues point directly to the supplied Space Pilot 3000 Transcript.txt file and to frequency analysis. The natural interpretation is that each number corresponds to the frequency of a character in the transcript.

Using the raw transcript text as provided, counting character occurrences gives several exact matches immediately:

• 390 -> W
• 1002 -> H
• 580 -> Y
• 191 -> 0
• 1589 -> T
• 33 -> Z
• 141 -> !
• 762 -> D
• 352 -> B
• 88 -> 3
• 50 -> ?

...