It was harder than expected! One of the big difficulties with releasing macOS challenges is that not everyone or every team has access to macOS (unlike, say, Li

It was harder than expected! One of the big difficulties with releasing macOS challenges is that not everyone or every team has access to macOS (unlike, say, Linux which is freely available). In principle, contestants could have reversed it by piecing together scattered bits of documentation from the web; in practice, it's a lot easier to debug and reverse with the actual runtime in hand. I was sincerely impressed that several teams were able to solve it by reversing the AppleScript VM. For future competitions featuring macOS problems, we'll probably rent a cloud Mac for the duration of the contest (24-48h) and give contestants gated access to it, to remove that particular handicap.