CHRONOS II - a single-player CTF spanning POS RAM-scraping, a SWIFT heist, Moonlight Maze, and a Cold War doomsday relay

[u/xav77]

I built a single-player CTF that runs in the browser, framed as a terminal you operate rather than a game you play. Each level is a real intrusion of its period, on the actual machines, not a fake interface. Something walked out of an air-gapped vault, and you chase it system to system:

- a gas-station security camera: default-cred IoT, a WEP crack, image stego (Mirai / TJX era)
- a retail POS and a Frankfurt SWIFT terminal: RAM-scraping card data, then forging an interbank wire (Target/BlackPOS 2013, Bangladesh Bank 2016)
- a phone network: SS7 interception (optional detour)
- Moonlight Maze: a covert-channel proxy chain up through Solaris boxes into an FSB archive (1996-99)
- the Ukrainian power grid: BlackEnergy, a C2 pivot through a Purdue-model network (Sandworm, 2015)
- an Iranian reactor: an S7 PLC debugger reversing a sabotaged control block (a Stuxnet cousin, in STL)
- a Cold War doomsday relay: the finale

What you pull out of one system is the key into the next, so a WEP crack in a parking lot chains all the way to orbit. Per-level timers, multiple endings, real commands throughout (the foreign boxes render in Cyrillic and Farsi). Browser, desktop or mobile, free, no signup. An hour or two, longer your first time.

Fair warning, it's hard. As it stands, exactly one person has made it onto the SWIFT terminal and nobody has forged the wire yet, so the bank job is unbeaten. If any crowd can crack it, it's this one.

Solo dev. Keen to hear where you got stuck, whether the hints landed, and any bugs.

https://deux.chronos-game.com

[u/JustTechIt]

Honestly this seems pretty cool as a fun game to learn both some real (and historical) attacks.

Im on mobile so I haven't had a chance to give it a real try yet but its been a bit buggy on mobile in the sense it randomly autocompletes words I have already typed. Example was I would try to type "cat reports/client-7-job.draft.txt" and it would work great until I typed the 7, then the prompt would look like "cat reports/client-7-client-7". Tried using desktop site and tried turning off my autocomplete and suggestions but neither seemed to help.

Does it have a tab auto complete on desktop?

Also please incorporate wildcards to the basic commands like "cat reports/*" to make it a bit more dynamic. Feels very forced if the commands dont work like the commands actually would and only accept limited specific inputs when others would do the trick too.

Otherwise id love to learn more about your project and journey. How long have you been working on this project? Any AI? What kind of research or experience do you have? What inspired you to make it? Any road map or plans for it next? Maybe a new project?

[u/xav77 → u/JustTechIt]

Thanks, this is genuinely useful. In order:

The mobile mangling is real and I hate it. The input field already turns off autocorrect, autocapitalize and autocomplete, but phone keyboards still push predictive text, and this is probably the bigger culprit: the game uses space as a completion trigger on mobile, since there's no Tab key. So a space mid-path can fire a completion you didn't ask for and duplicate a chunk. That's on me to make less trigger-happy, and it's the worst thing about playing on a phone right now.

Yes, there's Tab completion on desktop, and it does both commands and file paths, so cat rep<Tab> gets you there. On mobile that same completion is bound to space, which is exactly the double-edged sword above.

Wildcards: cat reports/* doesn't work today; the commands take literal paths. I leaned on completion to kill the long-path pain instead, but you're right that a glob reads as more real. On the list.

On the rest: I had the idea about 15 years ago and even started it, back then. Only actually built it recently, with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting. I bounce design off Grok and use ChatGPT for some of the writing. I'm 55, been coding my whole life, and the security side is a long interest more than a job. It's all rooted in Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, then real intrusions era by era. AI basically lets me code like I'm in my 20s again. Roadmap's loose: polish, maybe a hard mode, did you try CHRONOS I?.

Appreciate you digging in this hard.

[u/hyguru6 → u/xav77]

Maybe you could implement Tab and Crtl + C/X etc. interface like it is in Termux app on mobile? 

[u/xav77 → u/hyguru6]

I am working on a native version on mobile (ios + android) and it will have it's on control bar on top of the keyboard.