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Has anyone worked on the messages in the insert? I have a theory about the second longer one but haven't found a way to prove it or do anything with the theory.
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I am looking at the shorter one. The skull has clues, as there seems to be a word in the mouth "Lepo"(?), the nose is a "spade" and there appears to be an 'A' on the forehead. What this all means yet, I am not sure. The ciphertext is throwing me off, as usually it is all lowercase and uppercase. So I am looking for ciphertext that is both. It is definitely not base64. -
Let others play without spoilers....yet...Comment
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Solved the first message; now working on the second. I believe it is a Vigenere cipher because there is some periodicity to the message. For example letters xb, xy, rr, and some others repeat. the blocks with i at the beginning and k at the end are always separated by two letters. The distance between Xb and xb is position 129 - 1 = 128 and factors of 128 are 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64. those could be possible key lengths. My scientific wild ass guess is we wouldn't use a small key so 2, and 4 may be unlikely. 16 and 32 may be good candidates. I noticed that the block is arranged where there are 32 characters per line except for the last line so 32 would make the xb character distances line up...
But now I'm out of ideas on where or what to try next. Any ideas or clues to try?Comment
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I posted this cursory analysis of the locations and quantities of letters within the insert text in the lanyard challenge a few days ago -- glad there's this thread now! I didn't glean much from it myself, but perhaps it will save someone else the trouble. Unfortunately couldn't upload an .xlsx or .csv, so .pdf it is...Comment
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Really enjoying the way the track listing for side A spells a message. Nicely done.Comment
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Who is GT?Comment
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I'm aware that the color coded message blocks on the insert are one of the easier things to decipher, but as far as I can tell there are two colors not represented anywhere in the two character strings. Does anyone know if there is enough information on the insert to determine what these two colors are?Comment
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Yesterday's impossible... :)Comment
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I think I have come up with a strategy to solve the second message in the insert. In my last post I posited that its a Vigenere cipher based on some periodicity and that the key lengths could be 8, 16, or 32. I find it coincidental that the message is arranged with 32 characters per line except for the last line:
The last line has six characters; I think the XX is just padding to keep the message blocks in multiples of 4. A Vigenere cipher is just a bunch of Caesar shift ciphers where each column is enciphered with a different alphabet. If our key is say, 16 or 32 characters, then our key is likely to be a phrase. If the key was shorter or a repeated word, I would expect to see lots of repeated characters and not just repeated bigrams, but I would expect more trigram and other n-gram repeats. So my strategy is to take mazerlodge's suggestion and try to back out a key. If we take each block of 4 characters in the message above and make tables of all possible decipherments from the Vigenere table -- for example -- Xbaw:
If our key is a famous quote or sentence, then I would try words that commonly start sentences such as "the", "there", "some", "same", "once", etc. See if any of those turn "Xbaw" into an English word. Then I would try to guess the next letters in the key and see if we can decipher the second set, "maek":
If the key is a famous phrase, then hopefully after a few iterations I would have enough of it to guess the rest of the key and then crack this thing.
The following may be a spoiler so don't read below if you want to try this on your own. I am not sure if I am on the right track, but here goes:
Using the Xbaw table above: I tried keys starting with "the", "there", "some", "once", ... all produced garbage for the decipherment of "Xbaw". When I tried words starting with "no", as in "nowhere", or "nobody", the "no" part gave me "kn" for "Xb". The only word I can think of off the top of my head is "know". If that is the case then:
Key: N O M A
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-------K n o w
So column N, O, M, A in that order will decipher the first word as "Know". So a possible key candidate so far is "NOMA"; but NOMA-what? NOMAD, NOMAN as in "No man is an island"? So the trick is to see if the table for "maek" would have column letter candidates to keep building the key into some popular phrase. If we generate tables for "wzme", "pgty", in the same manner as our first two tables, then hopefully after a few such tables we might build a key string with enough words that we could guess the rest.
Anyway, that is my plan. Feel free to help out; then we can see if my idea crashes and burns or bears fruit :)
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Interesting approach d@emon. I was actually thinking much simpler. Vigenere ciphers require the exchanging parties either already know a shared key or have a way to obtain the required key when needed, the latter approach providing even greater security.
Simply put, I was thinking the key for message two would be provided somewhere, or at least a path to the key would be provided.
Your analysis pointing to a phrase (opposed to a word) seems very accurate. Key phrases as opposed to words are the norm for everything these days, even for ever increasingly misnamed 'passwords'. Not sure I'm on board with your theory about the limits of a key being exactly 8, 16, or 32, or any other 'word boundary'. Seems a bit constraining. After all, the quote on the cassette laments constraints. Could just be a coincidence.
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So someone in another thread suggested listening to the tape in an oscilloscope. So I did and I think it has a clue to find the key for the Vigenere; I don't own an oscilloscope so I used this one: https://dood.al/oscilloscope/ and downloaded Side A from the media server: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2...0Mode%20Badge/.
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Got the vigenere, but the colors and other cipher are not coming to me yet.
Edit: Colors done.Last edited by HatoLine; August 8, 2020, 08:19.Comment
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