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So just for context - my (now former) coworker Megan is a HUGE nerd, but she's always been a bit of a troublemaker too. I mean, she once got caught stealing some monitors and managed to get off with just a verbal reprimand using some excuse that I couldn't believe our boss Randall bought. But this time, she went too far. She absconded with a lot of important data and has vanished to who knows where in order to do who knows what with it. (Make money? Play Call of Duty?)

While the police are hunting down leads on her location, my whole team has been trying to get into her computer. We managed to crack most of the files, including her passwords list, but one directory remains locked to us. Now Megan always goes on about how passphrases are more secure than traditional passwords, but there's one entry in her password file that is just a string of random letters. We checked to see if that was the password to the locked directory - it isn't. But even though things aren't adding up, we're certain that it holds the key to unlocking the last of Megan's files and finding out her plans.

Can you help figure out her passphrase?

HOALPDKWIOVHUDGOBFGQBSIKQIGIRHSFZVNTABNLVLSSTEVKAAGVCYGDMMPIRJRITWQKVSTYNWGGBQPCLLKGWMKHKJZGKXOYUJX

Note that the flavor text is not just for flavor. Bonus points for finding all of the hints I left in there.

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Here's my attempt

From Ben's answer, we found that

If we vigenere with the key XKCD, the prefix decodes to KEYISTITLETEXTELEVENEIGHTY

From there, we could proceed.

The unused text is: GIRHSFZVNTABNLVLSSTEVKAAGVCYGDMMPIRJRITWQKVSTYNWGGBQPCLLKGWMKHKJZGKXOYUJX

The title text of XKCD 1180, stripped of punctuation and spaces is: withinfiveminutesofthesingularityappearingsomebodywillsuggestdefraggingit

Using the vigenere cipher, we get KAYAKSUNSPOTARCHAEOLOGISTPINGMETRICUNICODEDEHUMIDIFIERTREASUREGEIGERGLOBE

Separating: KAYAK SUNSPOT ARCHAEOLOGIST PING METRIC UNICODE DEHUMIDIFIER TREASURE GEIGER GLOBE

Interestingly, these seem to correspond to XKCD comics, so I don't think this is a final answer yet.

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  • $\begingroup$ This is the correct final answer. Congratulations. $\endgroup$ Commented yesterday
  • $\begingroup$ Nice! I have no idea why I decided to completely ignore most of the text. $\endgroup$ Commented 7 hours ago
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The direct deciphered text is "KEYISTITLETEXTELEVENEIGHTY" (excluding gibberish at the end. The key referenced would be "Virus Venn Diagram," though.

I first searched Google for Megan AND Randall and got a result from Explain XKCD. Randall is the creator, and Megan is a character. Further Googling resulted in me finding comic #936 ("Password Strength"). The comic aligns well with this puzzle's background text. I knew it was a Vigenère cipher, so I just started brute forcing with different keys related to the comic. I ultimately found that "XKCD" produced a usable result. After stripping off superfluous characters, I arrived at the answer I gave above. However, if you don't take that answer as the endpoint and instead follow it like an instruction, you get "Virus Venn Diagram" from the title of comic #1180.

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  • $\begingroup$ Not quite... You're halfway there, though. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ reveal spoiler Within five minutes of the Singularity appearing, somebody will suggest defragging it. $\endgroup$ Commented 2 days ago

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