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[Abraxas]

[PUZZLE] VaporLofts Tokyo - 404b.html - cipher

[Caspian]

Just wanted to get the letters of those images in text format so we can start copying and pasting them into whatever programs might help. Since it's code_l and code_r, I'm going to put them side by side.

[Abraxas]

I was thinking this could be another Playfair Cipher, because we have a left and a right side and they could be the left and right letter from each pair. But there are two things which don't speak for this assumption:
1. The right side is two letters shorter than the left side. You could make up for that by just taking the last two on the left side in that order for the last letter pair. But more importantly
2. notice that the sequence "OXGIVQFVER" - which might well be VaporLofts - appears twice, once spanning from the left to the right side, which suggests that, whatever this is, we have to read it just from left to right as if the two parts were next to each other.
Keeping that in mind it could be as simple as a substitution, but if the above is indeed "VaporLofts" it can't be 1:1 for each letter.

It's a pity. I was getting ready to fire up that neat Playfair Cipher Breaker tool, again...

[Animac]

Vapor seems to enjoy used different forms of encryption tho, so if it's not 1:1 it could be a polyalphabetic, which can be tricky but stilll crackable. Any thoughts. The picture won't display on my PC for some reason but if you could post your suggested cypher text I could apply polyalphabetic cracking to it??????

[Abraxas]

[Abraxas]

pl_walker from chat just mentioned that all 26 letters are present and there are 26 rows if you count 13 for each side. Clue?
I did a frequency analysis, including digraphs and trigraphs, tried to work it into a simple substitution...I don't think so.
Frequency came up like this:
V 24 ########################
F 23 #######################
X 21 #####################
J 19 ###################
Q 19 ###################
A 17 #################
O 17 #################
W 16 ################
Z 16 ################
B 15 ###############
N 15 ###############
P 15 ###############
S 15 ###############
K 14 ##############
R 14 ##############
E 13 #############
I 13 #############
L 13 #############
M 13 #############
Y 13 #############
G 12 ############
U 12 ############
C 11 ###########
T 11 ###########
H 9 #########
D 8 ########

There are 388 characters and even the least frequent letter appears 8 times. Isn't that too much? I guess some advanced codebreakers already came to that conclusion, but I thought I point it out anyway.
So, is the OXGIVQFVER pattern really just a coincidence?

[Caspian]

Yes, I would assume it's a safe assumption that it's not a simple substitution cipher. My first thought was either Column Transposition or Vigenere, but I have not had any luck with either of them.

I have a gut feeling that the Morse Code text is not simply a title. I'm thinking that it's a decryption key of some sort (like a Vigenere code phrase or something) but I can't figure out what it is. Yet.

I also think that the two images belong side by side. The text in the left image seems to be slanting downward at the same angle as in the right photo. Could be wrong of course. That's just my instinct.

[Abraxas]

Regarding Viginere:
There are 388 characters. If this is a Viginere cipher the key has to be either 4 or 97 letters long.
Well, 4 is possible, of course.

[Caspian]

Could you explain that assumption more? I've looked up several sites on the Vigenere Cipher and I don't see any key length requirements. I doubt it's a Vigenere Cipher anyway, but just for reference...

[Abraxas]

The prime factorisation of 388 is 2*2*97. I believe the length of a Viginere key has to be a factor or otherwise there will be letters left out. 4 seems to be the only option in that case.

[Atrophied]

Not strictly true, you can use any length key, but the key may be truncated at the end of the cipher (after multiple repetitions).

for example, if I encoded the following

[pl_walker]

Not sure if it means anything, but if you take one of the 5 letter codes and google on it, you get several anti-spam sections, but you also get a couple other obviously coded pages.

I am fairly sure there is no game relations from the website. If we can figure where the code is explained, we might be able to figure this out.

[mapmaker]

To add to the key length discussion:

If we accept that the OXGIVQFVER string that appears twice is coded to the same phrase/words, and if we assume that it is a Vigenère cipher, we can narrow down the key length options.

According to the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigenère_cipher]Vigenère cipher Wikipedia article[/url], if a segment is repeated in this cipher, the number of characters between the first characters of the repeated segments is a multiple of the number of characters in the keys. I count 280 characters - this factors to (2^3)*5*7.

I've tried it multiple ways with the string OXGIVQFVER decoding to VaporLofts, and I haven't been able to make it work. I've also tried the following as keys: error, vapor, lofts, vaporlofts, tokyo, subject, belton, fhowrpg, orygba, pass, and password, among others. This is, of course, assuming it's a Vigenère cipher.

[pl_walker]

But that assumes that it is the left set of letter and then the right set. I'm not entirely convinced that is the way to look at it.

There are three possibilities that I can see working here. I'm sure there are more, but these three seem to fit the arrangement:


Put the two pieces next to each other:
LLLLL LLLLL LLLLL RRRRR RRRRR RRRRR

Column by column
LLLLL RRRRR LLLLL RRRRR LLLLL RRRRR

Letter by letter
LRLRLRLRLR LRLRLRLRLR LRLRLRLRLR

I know the "pattern" is broken up if you do anything other than the first, but I'm not convinced that is the right way.

[Caspian]

It could very well be one of those patterns and I say go for it. To me, the images looked like the left and right sides of a single piece of paper. But, since nothing has made sense that way, you could be on the right track!