unforum

[Crisssy101]

ARG Decoding 101 (2011)

[notgordian]

Text
For text-based ciphers, Rumkin.com provides tools for many of the more common ones you're likely to encounter. If you're dealing with binary/hex/base64 conversions, try out this site. I prefer Unfiction's ROT-IT for Ceaser ciphers (where each letter's position is shifted 13 characters), because it gives you every other character shift iteration.

If you're trying to solve something you suspect is a substitution cipher by hand, frequency analysis is likely to cause you to pull out your hair, but might help if you have a large enough selection of text. Simon Singh's Black Chamber (a highly useful reference in its own right) has a tool that automates part of the process. There are a lot of general resources on how to make that process easier: here's one.

If you suspect you might be dealing with an anagram, try Wordsmith.org's Anagram server: it has some nice advanced features. It also helps to write out the letters in the shape of a pyramid: your eye is trained to read left to right, so mixing the order up helps see potential combinations with greater ease. If, on the other hand, you're trying to identify a foreign language that's unfamiliar, Omniglot's the way to go.

Images
I'm horrid at images, but one trick I've picked up is liberal use of TinEye, an image search engine that might help you find the source image used so you can compare to see if there's any differences that jump out (which might indicate steganography or something the creator added).

As an aside, one of the more popular steganographic programs, Camouflage, can be hacked without a password. Instructions on how to do that can be found here. Knowing this, some PMs have taken to using other programs like JPHide. There's a sister program called JPSeek that will try and detect files with steganography, but it has an atrocious false positive/negative rate.

Audio
Audacity is a fairly powerful (and free) tool that lets you modify files in all sorts of fun ways.

Video
If you're looking to download files from *insert video site here* for further tweaking, go to KeepVid.

You may have noticed that the audio and video sections are atrociously short. That's because I'm not particularly helpful on those puzzles.

[JaneBroadway]

Is steganography common?