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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
[Puzzle] #243 Silver - Shuffled Part 2 (Read 1st Post!)
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Austin
Boot

Joined: 28 Feb 2006
Posts: 53
Location: uk

 		This seems like a reasonable point to add this comment from Bruce Schneier's website http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html:

Quote:

Optional step: (This is NOT used in the examples below.) Use the final two characters to set the positions of the jokers. If the second to last character is a G (a 7), put the A joker after the seventh card. If the last character is a T (a 20), put the B joker after the twentieth card.



which it suggests should take place at the end of the key generation phase. None of the source codes provided on his page use this option and I have not seen it mentioned either in this forum or the Wiki.

Unfortunately, I have tried this with most of the key suggestions mentioned without success.

I also thought that this optional step makes no sense. If you were going to move the jokers using this encryption, you would want to do it before the keying phase to move them away from positions 53 and 54 in the pack surely?

Is it possible that neither the website nor the book are allowed to give the full implementation of his solitaire encryption?

PostPosted: Thu Jun 15, 2006 7:12 pm
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chimera245
Decorated

Joined: 09 Mar 2006
Posts: 209

 		Has anyone looked into using

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Centrifuge


as the crib.

See (warning LOADS of spoilers inside)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
http://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/Department_of_Cryptology


for details of why.
[/spoiler]

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 12:33 am
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Sh1ft
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Joined: 12 Nov 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
Austin wrote:
This seems like a reasonable point to add this comment from Bruce Schneier's website http://www.schneier.com/solitaire.html:

Quote:

Optional step: (This is NOT used in the examples below.) Use the final two characters to set the positions of the jokers. If the second to last character is a G (a 7), put the A joker after the seventh card. If the last character is a T (a 20), put the B joker after the twentieth card.



which it suggests should take place at the end of the key generation phase. None of the source codes provided on his page use this option and I have not seen it mentioned either in this forum or the Wiki.

Unfortunately, I have tried this with most of the key suggestions mentioned without success.

I also thought that this optional step makes no sense. If you were going to move the jokers using this encryption, you would want to do it before the keying phase to move them away from positions 53 and 54 in the pack surely?

Is it possible that neither the website nor the book are allowed to give the full implementation of his solitaire encryption?


I read that before but didn't give it much thought. I think that nobody has bothered coding it, I suppose it goes back to the Schneier web page where he says:

Quote:

What matters is that the sender and the receiver agree on the rules. If you're not consistent you won't be able to communicate.


I wonder, does again moving the jokers after moving them around during the keying phase provide further security?

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 3:42 am
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echidna
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Joined: 28 Jan 2006
Posts: 288
Location: Notts, UK
kian wrote:
If we shuffle the dissappearing text, we can get:

UHUFF LEDFO URTHP RIMGX

Then if we drop the trailing 'X' and rotate the first and last letter by -2, we can get:

SHUFFLED FOURTH PRIME

This seems interesting because the rotated letters "frame" the phrase much like the ciphertext is "framed" by the dissappearing letters.

GuiN wrote:
I think the key is in the whispered message. The key is the core of the puzzle and there is certainly a reframe needed if this is a solitaire

This may well be a bit random but these two comments lead me in this direction:

I agree that the whispered message is the key to solving this and I reckon it could well be a cryptic clue, particularly because of - without wanting to kick off another grammar debate (see Riemann Confused ) - the not-strictly-neccessary comma.

I also thought that Kian's idea of shuffling the disappearing text was interesting but I'm not totally convinced by having to rotate just a couple of letters. Plus, although it's hard to judge such a short piece of text, the letter distrubution is pretty unusual - three Us, three Fs but only one E for example.

However, if you read the whispered message as a cryptic clue then, as mentioned previously, the 'outward looks' could refer to the 3 one-eyed Jacks whilst the 'leave you cold' could mean minus (as in temperature - minus degrees = cold). If you take the disappearing text and minus 3 from each letter (or, in other words, Rot-23 it) you get BLAJC UORQE CEROD FCRIM which gives a more useful letter distribution to work with.

I'm currently looking at ('if entropy wins') anagramming this but with 20 letters the possibilities are manifold (although, interestingly enough, you can find both the words 'receda' and 'cube' in there, though not at the same time Sad ). I'm probably wandering up a dead end with this whole idea but if anyone else thinks this it's worth taking a look at then this is the best site I've found for anagramming - the 'hidden words' function allows you to pick out likely looking words and continue to anagram the rest.
_________________
Save the echidna! - www.edgeofexistence.org

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:33 am
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manleym
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Joined: 26 Dec 2005
Posts: 197
Location: Norwich UK
echidna wrote:

However, if you read the whispered message as a cryptic clue then, as mentioned previously, the 'outward looks' could refer to the 3 one-eyed Jacks whilst the 'leave you cold' could mean minus (as in temperature - minus degrees = cold). If you take the disappearing text and minus 3 from each letter (or, in other words, Rot-23 it) you get BLAJC UORQE CEROD FCRIM which gives a more useful letter distribution to work with.


To follow on from echidna's post i went through the main code with Rot-23 the text you get after that is

TYYJZ EDCFY IUZNY TBWCI FQEMJ ICEUV BQHUV IGLQV VKDVG YKLDF
CRSJP UFEDR OXDUE KNEOP UXTGR CGQXJ PJJLP JSYXX HMDSS TULSJ VHWMI IOI

Then tried to decipher it with no keyphrase and came up with nothing

With a keyphrase of 'Shuffled Fourth Prime' i got something

END Z CUVBDE AWQEZVKGAKBZJBZNRXODJVTBQY WAY DNR NEVER FINUD CFWFBCIFGHPYTYKY ARK ZDYJGROQMUKWBCRRCYPMGYZHACICITKNSLPRZ

Full words (bold/underline)
Part words (bold)

Other words can be found which are close to a word but with a letter in between.

Full Words: END, WAY, NEVER, ARK,
Part Words: CUBE, FIND

Maybe something?

*******EDIT********
What Made it more interesting was that it was on the 6th Shuffle i got the words
_________________
A Bolt here, a screw there, Ahh my Cube detector is nearly finished Mwah ha ha Twisted Evil Twisted Evil
The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
http://www.manleym.co.uk/shop

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 1:03 pm
Last edited by manleym on Fri Jun 16, 2006 2:11 pm; edited 2 times in total
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FranG
Boot

Joined: 23 May 2006
Posts: 35

 		Lots of different directions
So many new ideas at once...

Quote:
The problem solvers in that case were given the first 13 cards of deck order. From this, the contestants were able to absolutely decipher the first 3 or so characters of plaintext


I can see how they could get the first characters if they had part of the keystream, but part of the deck order??? I assume that was the deck order just before generating the 1st character of the keystream, since that operation alters the deck order. It must have been a very special selection of cards to allow them to go through the 5 steps of Solitaire 3 times without involving unknown cards.

Quote:
For example: If the ciphertext letter W decrypts to the plaintext letter E, then the keystream value is 18. This means that the output card must be the 5 of Diamonds or the 5 of Spades. We don't know where in the deck the output card is sitting, but there are only 53 spots for it... and each of those possibilities leads to a precise card for the top position of the deck...


But you'd have to do that for, hmm, 105 possible positions (for the 1st letter of a 4-letter word)? Yikes. It doesn't help that you could calculate a whole deck order for ANY phrase you like. You may be able to unravel the complexity better - I'm not good at that sort of thing - but it seems to me that your 4-letter word could exist with all possible combinations of the other 104 letters. In other words, each position of the keystream is independent of the others and each value is relevant only to the ciphertext in the same position. If you see a way around that, you may well be on your way to solving it.

About the joker placement - since the operation is not clearly defined and there are no examples, there are at least 2 ways to do it. You can use the entire pass phrase to order the deck and then use the last 2 letters again to place the jokers, or use the last 2 letters only to place the jokers.

I tried it on several possible keys, but got tired of playing with it. We've got so many possibilities multiplying them by 3 is not attractive. I decided MC wasn't likely to use an option that wasn't clearly described. Of course, it's not like anything else has worked...

We need a way to lock down 1 or 2 of the variables. If we knew for sure which letters were the ciphertext, and their order, we could concentrate on the deck order, or vice versa. As it is, every idea generates about 1000 possible decrypts.

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 1:04 pm
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manleym
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Joined: 26 Dec 2005
Posts: 197
Location: Norwich UK

 		Just as a laugh i thought that i would look up the words END, WAY, NEVER on google got nothing!

But then i had an Idea why not for the sake of it put Djinn in with the words and got this:

Djinn Rummy By Tom Holt

Seeing as rummy is a card based game it caught my eye Laughing

Link to one of the sites:
Spoiler (Rollover to View):
http://www.lmashton.com/works-in-process/djinn-rummy/

_________________
A Bolt here, a screw there, Ahh my Cube detector is nearly finished Mwah ha ha Twisted Evil Twisted Evil
The Most Beautiful Girl In The World
http://www.manleym.co.uk/shop

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 2:23 pm
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miamo_tutti
Boot

Joined: 06 Apr 2006
Posts: 50
Location: Colorado Springs, CO

 		If "outward looks" does indeed refer to specific playing cards, I'm still not convinced it's the three one-eyed cards because every face card is outward looking. In fact, you could argue that every face card but the one-eyed cards looks outward (whereas the one-eyed cards look left and right). Do we have a stong enough argument to say that it's one or the other (or both)?

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 6:15 pm
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Guin
Unfettered


Joined: 11 Jan 2006
Posts: 400
Location: Antartica

 		Ive been trying several things lately - some seem to be mentioned others not.

Several things are really playing on my mind about this at the moment - not least teh 108 characters - i am concerned that we dont have anything that is divisible by 5 - either an error on the puzzle architects part or a hint as to how we go with this if it is a solitaire.

Ive tried reducing the text and there is one way that this would work. Taking every 6th charachter would reduce the text to a number divisible by 5 - this would give us 18 characters and 90.

Obviously there are many ways we could do this and use the resulting text. Not got anything so far.

another thing i noted - the method of using the extra joker step - if we had a hint that this was the correct thing to do it would be very important. I am going to go back to some manual keying and will try this. It does add a level of security - as stated - if you are agreed on the step then it is important. however the only clue or hint we have is the mention of the joker and the star. The messanger never said anything to garnet (that I can tell) suggesting we do this extra / non extra step.

I could be wrong. but it might be worth a few manual paper and pen exercises
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So long and thanks for all the fish! Trout

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 7:40 pm
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noobie
Guest


 		I am nearly 100% confident that one eyed face cards play no significant role.

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 8:14 pm
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miamo_tutti
Boot

Joined: 06 Apr 2006
Posts: 50
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
noobie wrote:
I am nearly 100% confident that one eyed face cards play no significant role.


Well, you've got me convinced.

OK, I'll bite. What's your take on the "outward looks" then, or do you give any literal meaning to the wispered statement at all, believing it's there to be anagramed or otherwise decrypted for other purposes? If so, what is your reasoning?

I am nearly 100% confindent I'm not going to get a good answer. It's just, you know, sometimes being helpful is helpful.

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 8:36 pm
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Sh1ft
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Joined: 12 Nov 2003
Posts: 110
Location: Salt Lake City, Utah
chimera245 wrote:
Has anyone looked into using

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
Centrifuge


as the crib.

See (warning LOADS of spoilers inside)

Spoiler (Rollover to View):
http://perplexcitywiki.com/wiki/Department_of_Cryptology


for details of why.
[/spoiler]


Interesting, they refer to Djinn as a virus this time, other than the word worm, 'virus' would be a great place to start for an chosen plaintext attack.

(Once again i'll try this, last time I was trying the name Claire or Castille.)

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 9:04 pm
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themandotcom
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Joined: 28 Apr 2006
Posts: 136
Location: Syosset, New York, USA, Earth, Milky Way Galaxy, Universe
miamo_tutti wrote:
noobie wrote:
I am nearly 100% confident that one eyed face cards play no significant role.


Well, you've got me convinced.

OK, I'll bite. What's your take on the "outward looks" then, or do you give any literal meaning to the wispered statement at all, believing it's there to be anagramed or otherwise decrypted for other purposes? If so, what is your reasoning?

I am nearly 100% confindent I'm not going to get a good answer. It's just, you know, sometimes being helpful is helpful.


My take on the whole "outward looks" thing the clue for both the noise in the code, and the fact that Sente has something to do with it. But maybe it is anagramed, but I couldn't imagine an anagram that make sense be that long
But I agree that the Centrifuge thing is a good idea, ill try it

PostPosted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 10:01 pm
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miamo_tutti
Boot

Joined: 06 Apr 2006
Posts: 50
Location: Colorado Springs, CO
themandotcom wrote:

My take on the whole "outward looks" thing the clue for both the noise in the code, and the fact that Sente has something to do with it. But maybe it is anagramed, but I couldn't imagine an anagram that make sense be that long
But I agree that the Centrifuge thing is a good idea, ill try it


FranG had some pretty great anagrams of the whispered hint:

A LOOK IN YOUR STUDY WOULD PROVE DAWN CHO STOLE FILES
A LOOK IN OUR STUDY WOULD PROVE HOW CANDY STOLE FILES

It made me think that perhaps we are supposed to "shuffle" the hint to get the message, based on something the code on the side of the pack tells us. How the two would work in conjunction though I'm not seeing.

PostPosted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 12:40 am
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anansi
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Joined: 11 Mar 2006
Posts: 51
Location: Leeds, UK

 		Could the "outward looks" part be to do with the way the deck is riffle shuffled. Someone mentioned that there were 2 types of riffle shuffle: inner and outer.

Although, if you just use inner shuffles, seven shuffles will leave the deck unchanged.

PostPosted: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:27 am
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