When I was 10, I was spending all my spare time playing so-called 'fantasy gamebooks' or 'fighting fantasies'. You know, it's these books where you would read certain paragraphs depending on what you chose to do with your character. I have fond memories of the adventures of Pip, a hero who was accompanied with a talking sword afraid of spiders, and whose mentor was advising not to cast your 'lightning finger' spell while your hands were in your trouser pockets. Yeah, it was this kind of story.
So when I discovered the existence of a javascript engine tailored for creating such books and playing them on the web, it just snapped: I had to try it. But what to write about? Well, security, what else?
I'm passionate about security. The more I learn, the more fascinating it appears to me. And, as naive as this may sound, I believe that security can be made easy. And fun. To everyone.
So, here is the result. A story where you, the hero, are facing a persistent hacker. Every time you block one path, your adversary seems to find another way through. Will you succeed in parrying all the attacks? I bet you will !
I’m part of a team working on security and gamification (the guys who created the Android challenge*). This ‘book’ was built with the Choicescript javascript engine, that I evaluated as a gamification medium. Their website FAQ states that "As long as you don’t make any money off the code, you don’t have to pay us anything". So please don’t send me money ! :smile:
Just click the link and get into the story. It's not that long, you may even find it too short. You tell me. Tell me also if you like it and if you want more of these stories in the future - who knows?
- SAP employees can click here https://go.sap.corp/HackerVsTimelord to enjoy the story
- An external version is available here http://goo.gl/MntMg for the rest of the world
Cédric
(*) https://go.sap.corp/androidsec (internals only)
