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[addybobble]

Hi there. My first post to this group.

Built rccrypt like everyone else and decided to dig around with information about the key itself as, assuming it really is an rc5 type thing, which to me seems to be clearly the case, you're going to have to do something awesome with your computuation.

A while since I did any greek mythology (about 20 years), but I recall there traditionally being only 12 labours. AFAIK the thirteenth labour probably refers to Herculaneum, which is a town destroyed in 79AD when mount Vesuvius erupted. Herculaneum was supposed to have been founded by Hercules.

Kind of like the idea of the thirteenth labour being destroyed by a volcano.

And vesuvius is 8 characters, which might be worth a crack.

Another place to look: Even though this happened prior to the 12 labours, it has been also called 'the thirteenth labour', and slightly more racy. Hercules kills a lion with his bare hands. This lion was giving King Thespius of Thespiae a load of grief. Thespius is seriously impressed with this chap, so he decides to get him to have a child by all 50 of his daughters, so Hercules makes love to each one over 50 days. Each night he thinks he's with the same girl, and he ends up with 51 kids!

... so Thespius,thespiae etc. are another 8 chars probably worth a try.

Hope this inspires someone.

In the mean time I'll crack on with getting one of my linux boxes crunching this ...

[addybobble]

Oh, forgot to mention that King Thespius's main source of wealth was cattle, the lion was killing his cattle, so those cows on the card kind of make sense from that perspective.

[Telumehtar]

[Telumehtar]

Ooh, I just saw this:

[addybobble]

proudhon... nope. 8 character lowercase dictionary attack, nope.
I'm still crunching dictionary attacks: 2+5, 5+2, 8 , 6+1 etc. (all lowercase).

Also crunching bruteforce upper and lowercase, where the characters are ordered by use in the English language + removal of obvious characters (eg. 3 characters in a row the same) + at least one vowel including Y.

... this in the vain hope that the key is an ascii readable thing, as this shouldn't take too long to comupte

BTW. using 12 rounds.

I haven't written any distributed computation code yet: eliminating the obvious to start with.

Any suggestions about narrowing down the sheer volume of possibilities would be appreciated.

pycrypto v. good suggestion. Also for developers out there I'm particularly impressed with crypto++ if you want to have a play: it builds in visual studio no probs. Don't forget to download the docco

[sparhawk1974]

Hi everyone, this is my first post on here and I apologise if this has been covered already. There is so much on this topic to wade through!!!

Has anyone tried YIISTIA as the password yet. The card this was on (red #22 - cold Fission) stated that 'the Password is YIISTIA'. Surely worth a punt if not been tried already. If it has, then I will climb back into my cave!!

Not got the decryption software so can't try it myself.

[addybobble]

Hi,

There was a mention, but couldn't see a clear confrimation.

Already tried that uppercase, lowercase, First letter a capital. Also tried spaces at the front and the end, as we are looking for an 8 byte key sequence.

... and there's the rub: There's no guarantee that this is a set of ascii printable characters. The search domain is huge.

BTW: Done standard dictionary attack on this, 8 letter words, combinations of less than 8 letter words including and excluding spaces. Maybe some needs to ask Sente about the nature of that key, as if it's a 'proper' 8 byte key we're going to have to start collaborating to crack this using brute force: I simply don't have the resources to crunch this, but know what to do.

[manleym]

encryption or decryption

[hexDa3m0n]

Speaking of brute force....I sent a quick e-mail to the nice guys at perlexcity cards....

[sparhawk1974]

Can anyone tell me how I can get hold of the decryption software so I can help try and decrypt the file. Also will need to know how to work it and what dictionary hack/attack means.

from the end of this week I am working from home for a while so should have plenty of time on my hands. I'd like to put it to good use!!

[addybobble]

Hi,

Don't know if your familiar with building stuff in a development environment, so here are some rough and ready steps to get you started on windows (using cygwin and pycrypto which are easy to use when you get the hang of them):

1) Install cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/). You will need a decent connection speed as there is about a gig of stuff, but it will give you a command line like linux and the latest flavour of python, as well as gcc etc. It's really good.

2) Install pycrypto 2.0.1 (http://www.amk.ca/files/python/crypto/pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz). You unpack this (untar and ungzip: very straight forward). There's a README in there, but all you need to do is start up a cygwin shell, go to the directory with 'setup.py' in it, build it (python setup.py build), install it (python setup.py install), and you will have added this to your python environment.

3) Have a go with some starter sample files I have attached to this post. They were based on files earlier in this post + a very simple dictionary attack sample + some basic rejigging (nothing fancy). Unpack the attachment. Running one of these is a simple matter of calling 'python labourBruteForce.py' from a cygwin command line.

Hope that helps, and good luck.

[sparhawk1974]

Thanks for that. I will give this a go and see if I can hget it all to work!!

Thanks again.

[sparhawk1974]

[quote="addybobble"]Hi,

Don't know if your familiar with building stuff in a development environment, so here are some rough and ready steps to get you started on windows (using cygwin and pycrypto which are easy to use when you get the hang of them):

I'm not familiar at all with this stuff but am a quick learner and will give anything a go!

2) Install pycrypto 2.0.1 (http://www.amk.ca/files/python/crypto/pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz). You unpack this (untar and ungzip: very straight forward). There's a README in there, but all you need to do is start up a cygwin shell, go to the directory with 'setup.py' in it, build it (python setup.py build), install it (python setup.py install), and you will have added this to your python environment.

Succeeded in installing Cygwin easily enough but have failed miserably with pycrypto. When I try to unzip the file using winzip it just doesnt do it???

Any help you can give would be grately appreciated.

Thanks

simon

[addybobble]

No problem. You've got cygwin there, which makes this all rather easy. You need to unpack it the following way:

1) Drop the pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz in to the directory of your choice, say C:\mytemp
2) fire up a cygwin prompt (you should already have an icon on your desktop).
3) Go to that directory: cd c:/mytemp
4) Unpack the archive file: gunzip pycrypto-2.0.1.tar.gz
5) Extract the unpacked archive to the current directory: tar xvf pycrypto-2.0.1.tar
6) You should now see a new pycrypto-2.0.1 directory which you need to cd into.
7) Build and install python as described earlier.

Cygwin rules!

You should now be up and running, good luck.

[Fisgon]

I am sorry if this is a boring post but I have only just started perplexcity and although I don't have this card have been trying to follow the solve. I have not been able to trawl through all 19 pages but came across this website in my search.... is there any releveance???

http://ce.et.tudelft.nl/~knop/puzzlegallery/Hercules/

It says the Thirteenth Labour of Hercules is acutally a wooden puzzle and similar to alketruse.

Anyway as i said i am sorry if this has already been posted.