Intro
This post covers both Literally 1984 and Mystery as they’re related to each other. The description of Literally 1984 is:
An artist by the name of made a cover of a song I liked, but I don’t remember the original composer of that song. Could you help me find the original composer? Flag Format: csawctf{Firstname_Lastname} (replace all spaces with _ )
and the description of Mystery is:
Remember the composer from Literally 1984? Well, they made a song when they were part of a band in 1992, and it turns out that also made a cover of this song, collabing with another artist. What is the name of that artist? Flag Format: csawctf{ArtistName} (replace all spaces with _ )
Finding Cover Artist For Literally 1984
The description of Literally 1984 looks weird. It looks like the artist’s name is missing. Upon closer inspection, we notice there’s a zero-width non-joiner in the description.
After searching the web, we find the artist x0o0x_, whose biography at https://www.last.fm/music/x0o0x_/+wiki states the following:
Most of their content is uploaded on a nameless channel (this is done by using an invisible control character in unicode. It is encoded as U+200C, the “zero width non-joiner”, normally used for ligatures. See Zero-width non-joiner at Wikipedia for more info).
Finding Literally 1984 Song
We check all pages at https://www.last.fm/music/x0o0x_/+tracks for songs with cover in the title. The song titled Big Brother Cover stands out, as it could be a reference to Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel 1984.
After more searching, we learn that the original song is composed by Susumu Hirasawa. The final flag is: csawctf{Susumu_Hirasawa}
Mystery Uncovered
We find the P-Model album released in 1992 by P-Model, which at the time Susumu Hirasawa was part of. It contains the following songs:
After more web searching, we also stumble upon this Susumu Hirasawa Remix Collection. We search it for x0o0x_ and find a video titled LAB=01 / Ver.Chogakusei & x0o0x_ [ENG SUB]
As we saw previously, LAB=01 is a track included in the P-Model album. The final flag is: csawctf{Chogakusei}.