House of Frost Challenge Coin-Don't Do What I Did.

Thanks to the creator of this challenge.  I found it to be a frustrating, yet good learning experience.  I will detail my thoughts so that you don't do what I did.  Here is the challenge:

A test of breaching defenses with high wizardry… A magickal field surrounds Lord Alastair Frost One our psychics must breach at all costs An ether, an aura, a spirit exists His very thoughts it doth encrypt! To the demon Clearspot you must speak A passphrase he’ll require, then let you speak The phrase, it is said, may well be guessed Though at the end of the phrase, one further test: You must chant the hex of Malak al-Maut Only then may we see what Frost’s mind is about.

My thinking:  
Lord Frost is actually a person.
An ether, an aura, a spirit exists, His very thoughts it doth encrypt<-- encryption
Clearspot<--? So, I Googled it. Oh, a wireless access point.
Passphrase<-- I followed Lord Frost's Twitter page. When I think phrase, espcially after solving some challenges that have full sentences with spaces and punctuation, I was thinking an actual phrase. The guy is a hax0r afterall, he wouldn't make a challenge easy. So, I tried to guess phrases on his Twitter page. I tried most of my guesses in upper case because he spoke in upper case on Twitter.
Hex of Malak al-Maut-I literally thought it meant the hex of that phrase. I did find that it meant Angel of Darkness. I thought that maybe all that hex did a buffer overflow or something. I've seen that.

I found the default password for the wireless access point, thinking that it *could* be the phrase. I thought, nah, that would be too easy.

I didn't solve it by myself. When I saw Lord Frost, I tried to brute force the password. On the last day. I stood next to him for a couple of hours, showing him my attempts. I was close. I was trying the default password because he told me that I was onto something with that as the first part. He told me that the literal hex of malak al-maut as the second part was too complicated. He asked me what word, hex, and spell, the angel of death would say. When I think cast a spell, or place a hex on something, I'm thinking a verb, like, "die", not a noun or an adjective. He kept repeating hex has multiple meanings. I'm used to having to convert ascii to hex and vice versa for challenges. I showed him words that I was trying. He said there was no conversion necessary. He said that I was on the right track with the word list. He said that I had a lot of words with invalid characters, though. The second part of the solution was a word made withi hex characters. A word only containing A-Fa-f0-9. So, I've heard of l33tsp34k. Some of the words that I tried for the second part can be made into valid hex words. So I tried that. The answer was simpler still. The answer was the default password for the wireless access point and the word DEAD.  

The point is, I made it too complicated. I forgot that he was playing a character. Not the hax0r that he is in real life. He had to make the challenge available to everyone.  

Thanks for being so patient with me and helping me to learn. I apologize for being so persistent. Give me a puzzle and I will work on it for days. He gave me a coin. I didn't actually expect that, given that it said that we are allowed one attempt per day. I just wanted to solve the challenge. Solving challenges is a good way to learn. I was persistent, but in this instance, probably too persistent.

That being said:  

I was disappointed that it was set up as something where I had to follow the person. Sometimes it didn't show up on my wireless access point list.  It made an interesting story point.

Secondly, the time to solve it. We were only allowed to try while the person was in costume. I was in training/talks and spent a lot of evening time with the family. With the exception of Sat night. He left the access point so that we could try it on Sat night.

(I was disappointed about not spending much time on the ctf as well. Probably wouldn't have gotten many of those, anyway.)

Another thing, someone may guess that password without understanding why it was that word-ie, it was an actual hex word. Seems like a long shot, but they could. The why of something is where the lesson is. The lesson in this one wasn't the word, though. It was in thinking like someone else to gain access. And to defend against unauthorized access, don't use an easily guessed password.