[Nursie]

>> Well, if the algorithm is so broken then it should be trivial to break it even with their limitations.

This is the critical sentence from the article - "If you want to show that a system is secure, give the adversary as much power as possible, and if they still can’t break it, the security is good."

This is at the root of modern crypto systems, and without it a system is considered broken.

It may be that within the rules of the contest, breaking one message is non-trivial. That doesn't mean that I couldn't (for instance) collect and analyse multiple individual's traffic over time, or find a way to alter data in-flight, both of which are specifically ruled out of the contest.