unforum

[Uhtoff]

I might be wrong, but isn't a 'key' some kind of personal terminal/communicator and from the way those emails are written I'd guess that the Rambler X50 is a make of 'key'.

[doomsdayred]

I'd never noticed before but in the dead centre of the deck picture is the nautical compass and there seems to be a needle on it. Pointing North north east and south east at the opposite end.

This could be nothing or maybe it's the pass code NNE,SE or SE,NNE. It could also be a chronology reference ie 1:37 or 7:05ish.

Finally I did a search on a Compass cipher and got several results but nothing to explain how it works.

Any ideas?

EDIT - After looking more closely at the sentinal news article I have discovered this:
http://www.perplexcitysentinel.com/archives/2005/12/iona_interviews_12.html

The words "magic lamp" have virtually no wiki info and I can't find any other references to it. Could this be the key phrase!?

[Relish]

Just to maybe throw a spanner in the works, anyone thought that the letters that dissappear might be as important as the others?

[Jakeo]

I'm currently harbouring the idea that the 108 characters in the middle represent the text encoding of a deck sequence, and the 10 characters that disappear is the ciphertext.

I can't quite see a sensible way to encode the deck from the 108 characters at the minute though.

[jbjbaby]

Hiya all.

I have been lurking here working on this puzzle for a couple of days.
I've tried a few things but had no joy so far, so I thought I would summarise my approaches so far to see if anything sparks off.

I am fairly convinced about the solitaire cipher, considering the deck of cards, the marked joker, the ciphertext. It all seems to point to the solitaire.

After the simple code did not work, I considered that the 5letter groups might not be in the right order (i.e. shuffled). Since the solitaire is a sequential code it can decode the first five characters just as well as an entire message.
I tried the solitaire with a normal deck (ordered) and tried each block of 5 in turn. No luck. (apart from the ETKWY group decoding to AWAYQ, but the next groups all produce rubbish)

I have tried decoding the entire ciphertext using various initial keys from the instructions but no joy so far.

Note that with the java applet (bruce schneier's) the ciphertext spaces need to be removed as they are treated as real characters and will mess up decryption past the first five letters.
(use WBBMCHGFIBLXCQYWEZFLITHPJLFHWYETKWYLJOTYYNGYJBIOGIFUVMRXIHGURAGXHNQHRSXAWHUFJTAMSMMOSMVBAAKPGVVWXOVMYKZPLLUL)

This one is really keeping me up at nights!

Mr JBJBaby

[doomsdayred]

Check this out. A variation on the solitaire cipher called Mirdek. Could be the answer we've been looking for but I've spent about 3 hours trying to convert using Soliatiare and frankly my brain is fried.

At 1st galnce it looks pretty promising, anyway heres the link.

http://www.ciphergoth.org/crypto/mirdek/description.html

[minnie the third]

I have found a link to a java script that takes some of the legworkout of the solitaire cipher. Appologies if this has appeared already but it did not show up on the search.

http://cif.rochester.edu/~la002k/solitaire.htm#fields

[padge]

deck keying

[Jakeo]

Re: deck keying

[padge]

Ah, yes, it was your post that I read originally. I've tried to get a card layout from the code but I'm stumped.

[Danives]

[Cytos]

Similar

[ALISDAIRPARK]

I tried to check for Riemann, but had no joy, they wouldn't confirm anything.

[Ashin]

I spent some time looking at this over the past few days, and I have to agree with many others that the non-thermal text is probably an ordering to the deck.

A few days ago, this is what I came up with:

The solitaire cipher itself doesn't really rely upon the card face value so much as its number value, so as long as some 1-54 numbering exists, you have a deck order, who cares what the numbers actually mean. So I wrote it out using pairs (WB,BM,CH...), and as found before only 2 pairs double up. So I put them in alphabetic order (I tried assigning 1-26 and doing some stuff there, but adding won't work cause you can't represent 1 that way, and multiply%54 yeilds duplicates very early on)

AA, AM, BM, CH, CQ, EL, ET, EZ, ....

and assigned numeric values going down this way (with the exception of the double pairs, giving:

AA - 1
AM - 2
BM - 3
...

Becuase there are two wild card doubles, and two ways you could represent them (either joker A or B), there are 8 ways to orient the deck.

I tried decrypting the thermal text with all 8, then tried decrypting the message itself with all 8.

I only got one even seemingly interesting output, but I think it was just coincidence. It was:

RIGUTZZXYZZMAJGTIC (I think, pulling from memory here)

Magic Lamp? Majestic? I dunno. Anyone know a Rigut? I think it may have been pure happenstance, but maybe not. I'm blown out on this one for the moment.

The full numbers are:
43,3,4,11,19,30,5,51,8,6,22,18,24,9,45,7,28,49,25,37,50,16,23,21,13,10,*41J*,35,20,12,33,15,17,32,34,46,44,38,26,2,*36J*,31,*36J*,40,1,27,14,42,47,*41J*,48,52,29,39

[ALISDAIRPARK]

OK I also think the 108 letters gives us the card order somehow. There is another way to pair the letters, based on the position if you place them in two rows. This would give you:

WR BX BI MH CG HU GR FA IG BX LH XN CQ QH YR WS EX ZA FW LH IU TF HJ PT JA LM FS HM WM YO ES TM KV WB YA LA JK OP TG YV YV NW GX YO JV BM IY OK GZ IP FL UL VU ML

But again there are duplicates.