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Uhtoff · Veteran Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Posts: 75

Thanks Bri, hadn't picked that up Wink

**Posted:** Thu Mar 02, 2006 6:29 pm

SteveC · Unfettered Joined: 05 May 2005 Posts: 381

For what it's worth, very little probably, you can test keys again now on

http://www.connected.ltd.uk/pxc/

My hosts appear to have solved the problem, but as they didn't bother telling me, I've no idea in what way, whether it was intentional or luck....

**Posted:** Sat Mar 04, 2006 3:30 am

somethingsquare · Greenhorn Joined: 05 Mar 2006 Posts: 4 Location: Sheffield

Machine code

**Posted:** Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:35 pm

HiveMind · Greenhorn Joined: 04 Dec 2005 Posts: 6

checked

**Posted:** Sun Mar 05, 2006 4:51 pm

Jakeo

Got a message back from Jeff at distributed.net:

**Posted:** Mon Mar 06, 2006 4:50 am

c1023 · Boot Joined: 21 Oct 2005 Posts: 58 Location: Hampshire, UK

I think it would be worth trying alpha-numeric + punctuation/symbols (!"�$%^& etc.) before going to the full keyspace, as it is only 1/256 of the number of keys. From personal experience, most of my passwords contain symbols, but not the top 128 characters in the extended character sets.

**Posted:** Mon Mar 06, 2006 9:03 am

yomama · Guest

sweet!

'yourmama' is no good.
'YOURMAMA' is no good.
Promising: the decoded file for key 'Yourmama' is DBase 3 data file with memo(s)
'yourmama' is no good.

**Posted:** Mon Mar 06, 2006 12:41 pm

hairysocks

**Posted:** Mon Mar 06, 2006 4:35 pm

_________________
"You never can tell with Heffalumps"

x · Guest

Im not entirely sure how the whole decryption process works. But i have a though that might make it easier. Of course probably not.... But ill throw it out.

Would it speed up the decryption process if we took only the first 12 characters of the encrypted message instead of using the whole message?

So instead of using the whole string of characters it would process less per test. ... I say this because if words appear, a single word should be contained in the first 12 characters. ... this is significantly less characters to crunch thru per key. This alone may speed up the process over time, so if we have to brute force it... it might take less time?

For all i know the decryption would need the last character in the string as much as the first for it to work, so i might be just giving a useless idea out.

But thats never stopped me before.

**Posted:** Wed Mar 08, 2006 5:38 pm

babycakesjase · Greenhorn Joined: 28 Feb 2006 Posts: 3

On a similar note to yomama above...

'medusae' is no good.
Promising: the decoded file for key 'MEDUSAE' is DBase 3 data file with memo(s)
'Medusae' is no good.
'medusae' is no good.

**Posted:** Thu Mar 09, 2006 12:20 am

purplephreak · Greenhorn Joined: 26 Jan 2006 Posts: 3 Location: Essex

hiya, I've been looking at the thirteenth labor on the net and as well as being connected to medusa it is also associated with a type of puzzle where wooden blocks are interlaced to create different structures, the puzzle being either how to put them together, or in some cases how to take them apart again!

The man behind the thirteenth labor puzzle of this sort was a W. Altecruse. His last name literally translated means 'old cross', which is 8 letters long, I believe this is the length we are looking for for a keyword?

Oher possibilities I came up with while working through the information were infinitum, and two of the puzzle names were pyracube and scorpius.

Don't know if this is any help! I have no hope of running the crypto stuff myself so I figured I could at least try and come up with some possible keywords Smile

**Posted:** Thu Mar 09, 2006 10:12 am

Guest · Guest

I'm completely new to these forums and don't have any technical knowledge of computing or coding, so I apologise if I'm posting to the wrong thread. But I gather you're looking for a word or character string of up to eight letters which acts as the key to this code.

I tried "slavery" in the tool that SteveC posted a link toon the tortuous basis that the 13th amendment to the US constitution relates to slavery which is a form of labour. It came back with a message saying that the output was similar to a SysEx file which was probably a red herring but might be worth checking out. I can't do anything with this information (it's gibberish to me) but others might be able to. Hence my post.

Sorry if this shot in the dark wastes anyone's time.

**Posted:** Tue Mar 14, 2006 1:36 pm

BluesScale · Boot Joined: 06 Mar 2006 Posts: 14

Good ideas from purplephreak but none of those check out for me. Interesting new line though.

Shots in the dark are fine. There is little light around here.

Blues

**Posted:** Tue Mar 14, 2006 2:25 pm

t.w@

I've been watching the discussion on all threads for some time now - I'm posting on this thread because I want SteveC to read and I think he frequents this thread more...

All the comments from MC suggest we're going to have to brute this, is that right?
If so, I downloaded a list of around 20K 8-letter words (alpha only, real words only, probably still not a full list). If we've not started the brute yet, can't we start on it now? Comments from everyone suggest that there's a lot of people willing to aid the cause.
If SteveC releases his code and checking algorithm (I haven't checked whether this can be straight downloaded from the website yet) we can all take 100 or so of the words at a time can't we? Sooner started...

Then we use this (or t'other) thread to post what we have taken each time, posting possibles back when we've checked them. Possibly a third - clean - thread for these possibles for everyone to see, given that the existing suggestion thread is impossible to follow now.

Awaiting trout...

**Posted:** Wed Mar 15, 2006 6:10 am

hexDa3m0n

Spoke to Steve while his site was having problems and he gave me his script, but it was being stubbon so didn't publish it, however, have written a script that is going to test all the 8 letter words, will be running it later. (i'll check and add any of the words you got that i didn't, but mine had nearly 29,000!!!!)

I did something similar using windows using someone elses rccrypt, but none of them returned anything decent, so I assumed that there was something wrong.

I may need some people to help me trawl through the results to see if anything decent comes back......

Hopefully halfway through there will be some sort of sentence that has wierd characters instead of spaces!!!!!

Cheers
Hex Da3m0n

**Posted:** Thu Mar 16, 2006 10:06 am