unforum

[bertyb]

Could well be relevant then, but I am still of the idea that answer lies within some sort of cipher - the answer may point to Hercules, but without working it through it could be anything.

[locqust]

Well that thing Hally came up with is good, but the characters to code lineup occurs many times, so say 4D could be e, g,^ or even @ (guessing there at what they r btw) So I'm not sure how we could come up with the right message, because really we could make any message out of that!

But I may (almost likely) done something wrong while trying to decode it so if anybody wants to give it a try and see what they find...

[donstobbart]

I agree with you Loqust, I tried using Hallys thing, but can't seem to get anywhere that makes any sense. Am looking for other stuff.

Don

[bertyb]

I will try and do some research and see what ciphers are in existence.

[Ashin]

I heard back from PXC, and the card was not affected by the keyfile bug.

I'm kind of sad though, they wouldn't tell me if they used ECB or CBC mode. (Since knowing makes our lives no less difficult.)

[Ashin]

Could someone fill me in on hally's thing?

I'm failing to see how this relates to rccrypt, am I missing something?

[locqust]

Look about a page back there is a link for it, something Hally found, I got a feeling it is a deadend though.

[neuromancer]

Hi guys, not posted about this card for quite a while but anyway.

That thing that hally found was for Trillian, more specifically how Trillian encodes passwords. The text file is about exploring how to decode trillian passwords so I don't think it's of much relevance to this card, sorry.


In other news, development work on the BOINC brute-forcing app has been halted until I get all of my uni work out of the way, and there's loads of it so don't hold your breath. Doesn't look like this card is gonna see a solve for a while yet, unless someone comes along with an amazingly bright idea from outside the box, much like how we solved the Elucidate card. Oh well...

[purple]

keyword

[hairysocks]

Perhaps the labours of Hercules (or Heracles or Herakles) is just the starting point to look for a set of labours. After all, Hercules only did 12 and we're looking for 13.

The Wikipedia page for Hercules 12 labours (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twelve_Labours) has a note at the bottom about Agatha Christie's book The Labours of Hercules (Labours, of course, spelled the correct way, because she was English!).

Anyway, I looked a bit further into the Agatha Christie possibilities and found that she wrote a book called The Thirteen Problems (!) (see http://www.deliciousdeath.com/16/16eng.html). Has anyone read this? From this it looks like the 13th problem may be "Death by Drowning" (I've tried Drowning with rccrypt - 8-letter word, note - but no luck).

Too far off track? I don't know - what does anyone else think?

[Arramond]

Would it be at all possible for someone to explain how this rccrypt is supposed to help. I have it installed and i can type in the correct formated text and it goes and trys keys.....but it returns absolutly nothing every time. What is the point of this program and how does it relate to the hex code on the card? I'm sure this program is supposed to return some kind of information? Please point me in the right direction thanks.

Never mind i got it i think but can you make it return something everytime?

[VJBeam]

[Tarim]

For now, Tarim will assume that it is an RC5-64 problem. This leads Tarim to various possibilities (or perhaps flights of fancy is a better description).


1) The key is guessable.

Tarim finds this a somewhat dull solution and there seem to be enough people working on that at the moment. Let's look at some more interesting possibilities.


2) The key is random, but the answer is guessable.

Not many people seem to be trying this route. "The unknown message is: some things are better left unread", doesn't work. "The unknown message is: Cracking Des : Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design by Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Gilmore (Editor)", based on the phrase after the only five cows rating on <http://www.distributed.net/research/recommended-reading.php>, seems more like the right length - but doesn't work either.

This kind of solution would certainly appeal to Tarim if he were _setting_ the problem. Imagine the solvers' faces, when, after years of brute forcing the key, they find they could have guessed the answer! OK, so Tarim does have a darker side sometimes...


3) The key and answer are random (or at least unguessable).

The size of the answer box looks more suitable for an 8 character key than the possible 176 characters of decrypted text. This would mean the key is made of typable characters (the equivalent of a 52.6 bit key?) A brute force attempt should probably try these first. Pity it's the answer box that's case insensitive and not the key itself.

As an exercise for the reader: How long would it take for a computer on your desktop to solve the problem? Remember to take Moore's Law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law> into account.

Suppose someone comes up with a solution _before_ a public <http://www.distributed.net> style attack on this? What might you infer from this?

3.1) That Mind Candy's site had been hacked? If Tarim was Mind Candy - he would be tempted require the decrypted text rather than the key and to put a _false_ solution as the answer to #251. This makes the problem act like a kind of fake digital signature. Anyone hacking the site to get the solution, can't reverse engineer the key - so can't verify if the solution they have given is _really_ correct. Anyone finding they real key would _know_ they had the correct answer and would complain to Mind Candy that the site didn't accept the correct answer. Anyone hacking the site might think about leaving this question unanswered (almost like leaving their solutions anonymous). If Mind Candy hasn't done this already, perhaps they will now? How could you tell?

3.2) Or, it could be that someone had access to a _lot_ of computer power? Could this be used to give a lower bound on how much processing power is currently held by one of the larger security forces? Or perhaps of how many qubits of quantum computing are really practical by such a security force? Would this information be worth £100,000 to another security force? Is PerplexCity just a spy trap?

3.3) Alternatively, could it be a security force testing their own internal security? Has anyone from their staff been misappropriating processing power? On 26th August 2005, in <http://pxcforums.com/index.php?showtopic=28&st=10>, nynxer claimed, "completed this card... i think". nynxer was last active on 29th September 2005...


Hang on, there's a knock at Tarim's door - better go now. If you read somewhere that Tarim, "committed suicide" - be very careful

[pheebs]

I'm not too hot on technical geeky computer stuff (hehe) but came across this - have a stumbled on something useful, or perhaps just killed some more time at work?

http://www.molecularexpressions.com/creatures/pages/fivecows.html

[fretty]

Longhorn has eight letters, this is likely to be the keyword as it's hardly a coincidence. I think that this could be the end of this card.