Re: Cryptomania
 

Ah, I see ;). It's a modern version for people with computers and the right software:

"The classical one-time pad of espionage used actual pads of minuscule, easily concealed paper, a sharp pencil, and some mental arithmetic. The method can be implemented now as a software program, using data files as input (plaintext), output (ciphertext) and key material (the required random sequence). The XOR operation is often used to combine the plaintext and the key elements, and is especially attractive on computers since it is usually a native machine instruction and is therefore very fast."

Re: Cryptomania
 

... why use XOR?? ...
Because, as Bruja already found out, I wanted to show brackets and digits; which aren't producible via modular addition in our usual 26-alphabet. And if you kinda need the full ASC-range, why not use xor (which allows to produce any byte, by nature) in the first place?
Plus, on a technical side, xor is always the simpler alternative: reversible, and no overflows; but Hel already answered his own question above.

... Blind Obsession (Arabesque) ...
:nod: right, that's a hint.
The word Arabesque here is just for confirmation, so you know it was the book title you had to find.

... rest of the string could also be read "in pairs" ...
:nod: yes, they're byte values.

Re: Cryptomania
 

So do you have an XOR tool :biggrin:? Or did you write a program for it....

A byte being 8 bits, I suppose we could write that sequence, Bruja-esque, as

11101001
10011010
10100111
10101001
10101010
01001110
00101001
10011011
00101110
01101000
00001000
11101010
11001000
00001000
00101000

which doesn't immediately help though :cheesy:

Re: Cryptomania
 

... did you write a program for it ...
In fact I wrote me some Javascript helper scripts :)

... write that sequence, Bruja-esque ...
:nod: That's the right approach.
Except, you have too many lines ;)

Ok, back to the book title. Obsession is obvious, I mean, we are crypto addicts :insane2:; but what about the other word? :whistling

Re: Cryptomania
 

Blind -> braille ;)?

Re: Cryptomania
 

:nod: The blind love to read love stories too...

[EDIT]

:arms: Yes, Darius loves Gabriella!


You're up, Hel :jossun:

[EDIT2]
And by the way, my book about Gabriella and Darius got rather positive reviews. ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

I only have one question here..... Why is binary Bruja-esque???? Attachment 74121

Re: Cryptomania
 

:lol: I'm pretty sure I checked back on Blind Obsession, don't know why I missed that Gabriella/Darius



Not the binary part, but "rearrange in the proper size grid" I think ;)

[edit] Finally thought of something.....:

Attachment 74236

clue:

Re: Cryptomania
 

If the hint is a Poe reference, you might have used a substitution cipher...

Re: Cryptomania
 

Can't get anything past you :biggrin:

Re: Cryptomania
 

After converting the colours (RGB) to bit-triples...
... I tried getting numbers from groups of six bit...
... and groups of eight bit.
Several repeating patterns - and also the typical symbol distribution - point to a valid text body (that's why I assumed a substitution cipher in my last post).

Bruteforcing reveals some promising fragments, but without knowing specific keywords it's not an easy task. In any case, the 8-bit code contains better combinations (especially of E, T and A) than the 6-bit variant.
At the same time I was hoping to find kinda system in the symbols itself, though they're somewhat randomly scattered over the byte range.
So far it looks like a conventional cryptogram; perhapes I'm still overseeing a hint...

Does the gold bug actually refer to encryption or is it just for solution validation?

Re: Cryptomania
 

- Triplets: seem correct at a quick glance
- Numbers: you seem to take the long way round, but you're going in the right direction
- there is a definite system to the encryption, and it has to do with the Gold bug. No need for brute forcing, though I guess that should also work in the end (it will give you problems in 3 places though ;)).

Re: Cryptomania
 

... definite system to the encryption ...
One of my first assumptions, of course, was you were using Poe's exact symbol system.
Analysis showed that your symbol sets are mostly identical, but substitution didn't reveal meaningful text.

Here's my notes; I used ASCII code page Windows 1252 to get the values for exotic stuff, like, '†', '‡' or '¶'.


[EDIT]
This was the result of the substitution (without replacing your symbols 37, 80, a0, a1 and e2, because you might have either used a different code page than me, or even chosen improvised values):

H e2 80 a0 e2 80 a0 T I H T Y E A E E e2 80 a1 R A E E B S A P M T H F R E H B Y S T I S N H F R E H B 37

Re: Cryptomania
 

Seems there are two things going on ;).

a) I didn't use a lookup table, but an online tool; it seems to treat some special characters differently, but it does so reversibly (I only noticed when you came up with your list of 8 digit numbers above ;))
b) but more importantly, we seem to have put different interpretations on the Gold Bug :biggrin:

Re: Cryptomania
 

... online tool ...
I see. That's a UTF-8 encoded page, so we have special cases for some symbols which require more than 1 byte:
O : ‡ : e2 80 a1
D : † : e2 80 a0
V : ¶ : c2 b6
C : — : e2 80 94
That was tricky :rolleyes:.
(However, replacing the particular bytes now, I get...
H D D T I H T Y E A E E O R A E E B S A P M T H F R E H B Y S T I S N H F R E H B 37
... which isn't enlightening yet :lol:)

...different interpretations...
:nod: Apparently. Have to look into that again later...

Re: Cryptomania
 

Interesting reading ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

My theory about what you did:

1. Write down cleartext.
2. Shuffle letters. (Not sure which method)
3. Replace letters with Poe-symbols.
4. Write symbol bytes as bit sequence.
5. Split sequence into 3-bit groups.
6. Make each group a colour by creating RGB values.
7. Arrange colours line-wise in a grid.

Steps 2 and 3 are independent from each other, hence their order doesn't matter.

If you did not shuffle, then your symbol assignment might be different from Poe's (though I believe you stuck with the original). Or there's another secret step/quirk, that I haven't thought of yet.
In any case, you made up the symbol '7' (not used by Poe, so you must have needed either J, K, Q, W, X or Z) - which isn't a real problem, because it appears only once, as the last letter in the message.

[EDIT]
Only now, while reviewing our conversation, I noticed a strange remark of yours (at the end of #957):
What did you actually mean by "Gold Bug" here... the book/story? Or the animal? Or the cipher? I can't remember having 'interpreted' either of them - should I? :lol:
Also, I see you omitted the hyphen between 'Gold' and 'Bug'; accident or clue?

Re: Cryptomania
 

In case we had to interpret the Gold Bug the only thing that comes to mind is that you didn't use Poe's equivalence of symbols, but just a system based on your text's own frequency of symbols. That is, the most repeated one "8" would be the E, but then the second most repeated one "4" would be the T.... didn't find anything meaningful, though

Did it again, using the GoldBug's most repeated symbols compared with English most repeated letters, got that:

all that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream 7

Now I guess the last "7" corresponds to a full stop, doesn't it?

awwww.... :frown: I've just realized I used a system instead of my favourite solving technique Attachment 74291

Re: Cryptomania
 

:bow: Bruja beat me by 3 minutes! I got the same, but with pure bruteforcing. Happens to be a poem by Poe.

Re: Cryptomania
 

Haha, I finally see what happened... I read about the story on a French cryptography site, where they actually quote a few pages of the book, showing how the code was broken using letter frequency analysis. I didn't want to construct something that had enough letters in the proper numbers to 'allow' frequency analysis to work - brute forcing is fine, but I think you shouldn't base a code on it for these games....

Instead, I just looked to see if wiki had an article on the book, saw the tables there and assumed they were the 'solution tables' constructed in the book. I never checked the code text and answer also given in that article, to see if that was indeed the case :biggrin:.

I didn't know the text was from a poem either, I found it on a "quotes from famous people" page, without the question mark (I liked the "dream within a dream" part, as it fits with most of our cryptos ;)). As Bolaf said, I needed a filler to get enough 0s and 1s to make a grid, so I used the first number, 7, that wasn't in the code table and therefore had no meaning...

Anyway, well found :bow: and over to Buja :jossun:!

Re: Cryptomania
 

So now Bolaf uses bruteforcing to solve things and Hel understands Bruja-esque references.... it seems I'm a bad influence for you both :rolleyes:

Bolaf: Attachment 74298 Fifteen times the brinded cat hath mew'd.
Hel: Attachment 74299 Fifteen times the hedge-pig whin'd.
Coryphaeus: Attachment 74300 Harpier cries:

ebvcbjzjaa wj Saj hjh r jGjhwjjih hwarhhjh jih ijiujjaii Acr rje jhqjhwqjzwwws uaiji; jah jjhqj uhh euj hcg arhj :iau.

Bruja: Do you realize you're not witches and Shakespeare is not related at all with this???

Re: Cryptomania
 

Hmm, both the brinded cat and the hedge-pig seem to be working overtime... :thinking:

Re: Cryptomania
 

Attachment 74302

and now, as one-word answers or posts with only a smiley are not allowed I'm writing this just for my post to have a sentence or something that justifies it but the real answer is the witch above so you can disregard all this and just concentrate on your idea and think why it may be so instead of reading a whole meaningless paragraph which I could extend endlessly just for it to take more space and abide by the rules that make us players much happier and make the gaming experience so much easier and more fluent for everybody
Attachment 74303

Re: Cryptomania
 

Caesar(11) and then every 15th letter reads "Dutch smut churns up blushful succubus lusts; thus buff hunks plus hung studs must"... and so on. Due to PG13 the rest shouldn't be posted here, because it contains the f-word and mentions sl*ts (their names being Ruth and Lulu, by the way) :biggrin:

Re: Cryptomania
 

It was Caesar 15.... on the opposite direction. :tongue:
(This was the "difficult" version of my previous one :lol:)
Regarding your PG13 comment, Eunoia won the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, and has been said to be "Canada's best-selling poetry book ever." :hmmmthumb

Your turn again, Bolaf!

Re: Cryptomania
 

[edit] [deleted message]I don't know why the same post has appeared twice.... I only pressed the "send" button once (obviously, you can't press it twice, can you?)

Re: Cryptomania
 

Re: Cryptomania
 

Haha, I was looking for a 5x15 Bruja-esque grid :lol:



Irfanview got a bit confused when I tried to extract the frames, but online I got this, starting with frames 01 and 02(?)

Re: Cryptomania
 

...extract the frames...
Well, basically there are 8 frames. The official start of the loop, however, happens in frame 4 - where the actual (black) ciphertext shows up. This was for technical reasons, like image arrangement and minimizing the amount of sub-images.
I'm surprised about the text colour in your second frame; it should be brown on gray, like in the 3 bottom frames. Must be a quirk in the online extractor you used - at least my in browser tests (in FF, IE and Chrome) the colours were displayed correctly.

... Irfanview got a bit confused ...
I just checked that. Turns out that Irfanview does exactly what it says: "Extract all frames". And 'frame' really means 'sub-image' (and not 'panel'), that is, one gets all the individual elements used to construct the animation, and that's actually a clever extraction, in case you need the smaller (overlay-)images separate - as opposed to being molten with the background.

Re: Cryptomania
 

Yep, "live" the colours are the same, and another extractor I just tried didn't change the colours either ;).

:thinking: The triplets could be ternary trits(:))

Then

which doesn't immediately makes sense,
which does seem to make sense ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

... does seem to make sense ...
:lol: Yep, and if you understand how our blonde genius gets it solved (bingo), you can solve it too... ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

The girl is turning around.... I've been thinking about rotating the cipher, the text, or something.... but I still don't know how to do it

Re: Cryptomania
 

... rotating the cipher ...
:nod: two brilliant ideas!
You know how many rotation steps (look at her), and you know which 'cipher' the text has to be encoded to beforehand (because just rotating the shown text doesn't alter the letters).

Re: Cryptomania
 

I was thinking 4 steps, as she looks front, left, back, right but 4 doesn't really fit nicely into 7x6, unless it's the whole string that's rotating,
SOEFOZUNARUPPUQUATS_LODOLDMMSPBJLZUNATSZ LOM

That doesn't do anything with Caesar (which I guess you can call 'rotating') though, so it seems as if you need to rotate the columns/roes separately :thinking:

[edit] actual string is
SOEFOZUNARUPPUQATS_LODOLDMMSPBJLZUNATSZL OM

Re: Cryptomania
 

... thinking 4 steps ...
:nod: You were thinking correctly!

... the whole string ...
:nod: And again you're right. Though, as I mentioned before, it doesn't help rotating this text in its current form.

... doesn't do anything with Caesar ...
:nod: Correct. Caesar is kind of a 'vertical' rotation, while in our case we need more like a 'horizontal' one (as you have already figured out). ;)

Re: Cryptomania
 

But Bolaf said we had to encode the text first.... I thought maybe we had to convert the text into those triplets (I still don't know what the triplets are, by the way) and then rotate the numbers somehow to create different triplets which then translate into the solution....

..... too complicated? overthinking? or just showing I have no idea?? :tongue:

[edit] and Bolaf is a faster typer than me!!

Re: Cryptomania
 

... convert the text into those triplets ...
... then rotate ... create different triplets ...
... then translate [back] into the solution ...
:nod:

Re: Cryptomania
 

The 'original' triplets were ternary numbers ('trits', in analogy to 'bits' ;))

I guess we can encode the letters of the code text in the same way as I decoded the bingo and blonde genius numbers..... :blush:

Re: Cryptomania
 

... encode ... same way as I decoded the bingo ...
What can I say... bingo! :silly:

Re: Cryptomania
 

That would make the letters



and after 4 rotations we get (I think)


well, that doesn't seem to work. Could it be because I need a 7x6, rather than 6x7 grid :biggrin:?

revised rotated:



which translates to


so I guess I can start thinking of s'thing else again....

Re: Cryptomania
 

I have a question, why is the bold number a 201? I see a blank, wouldn't it be a 000??

201 120 012 020 120 222 210
112 001 200 210 121 121 210
122 210 001 202 201 110 120
011 120 110 011 111 111 201
121 002 101 110 222 210 112
001 202 201 222 110 120 111

Now sharing a crazy idea, what if we rotate the numbers "as a block" 90º left and then make triplets? 000 121 112 011..... (and repeat the procedure four times?... mmm... maybe we'll get the same original numbers)