Emojibius — broncoctf2026

Description

Our intelligence agency has intercepted a strange transmission. It looks like Gen-Z developed a new language. We found a cryptic image of an elderly person on a nearby server?? Can you recover the secret message?

Hint: Sometimes you can tell what's written all over someone's face.

Two artifacts are provided:

• intercepted_signals.txt — a single line of space-separated emoji pairs.
• artifact.png — a 2816x1536 close-up of an elderly person's face. Five header emojis (🍎 🦊 🍐 🐶 🎈) run across the forehead, and a faint 5x5 character grid is written across the face.

Goal: recover the hidden message.

Analysis

The title Emojibius is the key clue: Emoji + Polybius. This is a Polybius square cipher where the row/column coordinates are encoded as emojis instead of digits.

• The ciphertext uses exactly 5 distinct emojis, and each token is a pair — classic Polybius (row, col) coordinates.
• The image supplies the missing pieces the "written all over someone's face" hint points to:

  • The 5 header emojis on the forehead define the axis order (index 0-4 for both rows and columns): [🍎=0, 🦊=1, 🍐=2, 🐶=3, 🎈=4]

  • The 5x5 character grid written on the face is the Polybius square content:

    b r o n c
    { e m 0 j
    1 s _ g 3
    } a d f h
    i k l p q
    

Each intercepted pair (row_emoji, col_emoji) maps to grid[row][col].

Solution

Map every emoji to its header index, then look up the grid cell for each pair.

#!/usr/bin/env python3

# Header emoji order from the forehead -> index 0..4 for both axes
header = ["🍎", "🦊", "🍐", "🐶", "🎈"]
idx = {e: i for i, e in enumerate(header)}

# 5x5 Polybius square written across the face (row-major)
grid = [
    list("bronc"),
    list("{em0j"),
    list("1s_g3"),
    list("}adfh"),
    list("iklpq"),
]

with open("intercepted_signals.txt", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    tokens = f.read().split()

def emojis(tok):
    # each token is a pair of emoji code points
    return [c for c in tok if c in idx]

plaintext = ""
for tok in tokens:
    r_e, c_e = emojis(tok)
    plaintext += grid[idx[r_e]][idx[c_e]]

print(plaintext)

Decoding the 23 pairs step by step:

🍎🍎=(0,0)=b  🍎🦊=(0,1)=r  🍎🍐=(0,2)=o  🍎🐶=(0,3)=n  🍎🎈=(0,4)=c
🍎🍐=o        🦊🍎=(1,0)={  🦊🦊=(1,1)=e  🦊🍐=(1,2)=m  🦊🐶=(1,3)=0
🦊🎈=(1,4)=j  🍐🍎=(2,0)=1  🍐🦊=(2,1)=s  🍐🍐=(2,2)=_  🍎🦊=r
🍐🍐=_        🍎🎈=c        🍎🦊=r        🍐🍎=1        🍎🐶=n
🍐🐶=(2,3)=g  🍐🎈=(2,4)=3  🐶🍎=(3,0)=}

Concatenated: bronco{REDACTED}.