Shmooganography

The speakers run the steganography contest that has been a fixture at ShmooCon for many years. Teams work through a multi-stage puzzle in which each stage yields a code word and a clue. The game is coordinated by email rather than a booth, and the speakers explain how it began as a small solo project with hidden codes slipped into printed pens and grew into a five-stage game with prizes and sponsors.

The middle of the talk covers how the game is built: logistics, technique design, and deployment, all tied to a yearly theme such as Magic: The Gathering cards, The Legend of Zelda, or Stargate. Examples include UV-printed posters, a display that needs polarized glasses to read, a USB-based stage, data hidden in JPEG streams, and a Wi-Fi capture that could not be broadcast live. They also describe failures, including an infrared stage with LEDs too weak to show the message, a light-based stage that needed a black tablecloth, and overlapping media that confused teams. Backup plans, such as distributing the capture file, kept those stages playable.

The speakers close by reflecting on the effort involved, the value players get from the challenge, and the uncertainty about what follows, since this is the final year under the current name. For practitioners running puzzle or CTF-style games, the takeaways are to avoid single shared bottlenecks, keep stages visibly distinct, and plan for deployment failures before they happen.