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 Forum index » Diversions » Perplex City Puzzle Cards » PXC: Silver Puzzle Cards
[PUZZLE] #251 - Silver - The Thirteenth Labour
Moderators: AnthraX101, bagsbee, BrianEnigma, cassandra, Giskard, lhall, Mikeyj, myf, poozle, RobMagus, xnbomb
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Macavity
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Joined: 25 Jul 2004
Posts: 883
Location: UNSC Comm Relay Station Alpha, West Shokan, NY

 		Okay, got a reply to my post over at the Defcon fora. Here's the deal:

Qu|rk from Defcon wrote:
9,225,283,403,065,065,472 keys in 1331 days, which they cited as being 1/2 of the total possible at... 210 Gkeys/sec .... rules out brute force.

There is a thread about e-books in the forums here that lists a ton of computer/crypto ones in 1 shot.. I remember it having a URL involving engineering and a .uk address as well. I do remember it having a ton of RC5 stuff in it, and explanations of how to solve based on parts you may or may not know.

As for IV... try conversions of KU, RT, KURT, TURK, TU, RK, and then add and subtract each. I saw the picture that you're looking at, and no one has mentioned anything about those letters in the upper left.. which has me curious if they're actually there for a visual distraction to mislead, or so blatantly obvious that most analytical will think it'd be too easy if that were the answer. I will do a bit more research and post as/if I find something.

Qu|rk-


I believe the KURT he's referring to is Kurt McAllister's signature on the card - however, his suggestion that a conversion of the letters KURT (in some order) might provide the initialization vector has merit, methinks. ( Hey, it's just devious enough for the Perplexians, to hide the IV in plain sight Razz ).

Am taking a look around for that thread he mentioned - the one with the ebooks - and will post as soon as I've found it.

EDIT: Okay, found it: Defcon Forums E-Book Thread
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 10:31 am
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oliverkeers13
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 		We seem to have dismissed the idea that the top is a date too fast, as far as I am concerned. COmputers write dates in the form YY/MM/D. So the it COULD refer to the 8th of december 1964! NOt sure where this leaves us, though.
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PostPosted: Mon Sep 12, 2005 2:51 pm
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WolverineFan
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Joined: 30 Dec 2004
Posts: 192
Location: Michigan/USA

 		Anyone actually working on brute-forcing this? I'm thinking the chosen-plaintext differential cryptanalysis approach is probably our best bet. 2^44 plaintexts ought to get us close to the solution. Maybe less if the encrypted text is highly repetetive.

I found Postscript, Plain Text (Google Cache}, various other format links to the paper that discusses this approach, though the details are over my head.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 2:10 am
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BrianEnigmaModerator
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Joined: 05 Oct 2003
Posts: 1199
Location: Pacific Northwest
WolverineFan wrote:
Anyone actually working on brute-forcing this? I'm thinking the chosen-plaintext differential cryptanalysis approach is probably our best bet.

"Chosen-plaintext" really does us no good in this instance. Chosen-plaintext basically means: "Hey, I have this document. Can you encrypt it for me. I have this other one, can you encrypt it for me, too?" If you have access to the black box that does the encryption and you choose certain things as your plaintext, the ciphertext might give you some insight as to what the public/private key pair is.

In this case, it will just have to be a brute-force approach. To my knowledge, nobody has worked on this yet. Currently, my excess computing resources are being used to break the Solitaire cipher because I have real, working code to start from. Unfortunately, I can't find any known-good code for RC5-64. Several people have pointed to RC5-32 and done some hand-waving along the lines of "oh, just double the block size or something," but I would rather not waste CPU cycles running code that I don't feel so sure about when I have other code I feel quite certain about.
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 2:35 am
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WolverineFan
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Joined: 30 Dec 2004
Posts: 192
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BriEnigma wrote:
"Chosen-plaintext" really does us no good in this instance. Chosen-plaintext basically means: "Hey, I have this document. Can you encrypt it for me. I have this other one, can you encrypt it for me, too?" If you have access to the black box that does the encryption and you choose certain things as your plaintext, the ciphertext might give you some insight as to what the public/private key pair is.


Ok, so my knowledge of RC5 and cryptanalysis is limited to about 3 hours of reading Smile What I got from these 2 pages:

http://www.iridis.com/Differential_cryptanalysis
http://www.iridis.com/Chosen_plaintext_attack

was that "chosen-plaintext" essentially meant that you had the ability to encrypt a message using the same encryption engine and could encrypt any plaintext message. Analysis of the resulting encrypted messages would help you pick different plaintexts to encrypt. Eventually you could determine the key used to encrypt the original message.

On re-reading it (after some sleep) it appears that, as you said, you need to be able to encrypt each plaintext message with the same key as the original message used. Bummer. At 1:30am this seemed possible Smile

BriEnigma wrote:
In this case, it will just have to be a brute-force approach. To my knowledge, nobody has worked on this yet. Currently, my excess computing resources are being used to break the Solitaire cipher because I have real, working code to start from. Unfortunately, I can't find any known-good code for RC5-64. Several people have pointed to RC5-32 and done some hand-waving along the lines of "oh, just double the block size or something," but I would rather not waste CPU cycles running code that I don't feel so sure about when I have other code I feel quite certain about.


I didn't find any source code in my searching either. I suppose since it's going to take 3-5 years to crack it there's no big hurry Smile

As you were....
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PostPosted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:40 am
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neuromancer
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Joined: 04 Aug 2005
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Quote:
I didn't find any source code in my searching either. I suppose since it's going to take 3-5 years to crack it there's no big hurry


I highly doubt that MC are gonna keep this ARG running for that long!!! This encoded message is obviously important enough for them to ultra-encrypt so I'm guessing and hoping that sooner rather than later they drop us some clues as to whats in the 'black box'.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:03 pm
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Malinky
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Joined: 02 Aug 2005
Posts: 15

 		Looking at the distributed.net site they have a section of reviewed books
http://www.distributed.net/research/recommended-reading.php.
The books are rated in cows and only one has a five cow rating like the bottom of the card, the book is Cracking Des : Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design and a copy can be found at crytome.org/cracking-des.htm apart from chapters 5-7 which are offsite with a broken link, I think they might be relevent, I can't find much on the DES II challenge but I read somewhere solved text was "many hands make light work"

Going to do a bit more research.

PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 5:57 am
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neuromancer
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Joined: 04 Aug 2005
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 		Malinky wrote:

Quote:
... the book is Cracking Des : Secrets of Encryption Research, Wiretap Politics & Chip Design and a copy can be found at crytome.org/cracking-des.htm apart from chapters 5-7 which are offsite with a broken link...


Not to be annoying or anything but you missed a 'p' in the link, the correct link is http://www.cryptome.org/cracking-des.htm

I do think that you may be on to something, and I'll be doing some more research as well.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 11, 2005 4:00 pm
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Riiick
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Joined: 29 Apr 2005
Posts: 82
Location: Canterbury, Kent, UK

 		Has anyone found a program capable of decrypting this if we had the correct key?

If we did we could at lest try some keys, for example the one distributed.net used to decrypt the RC5-32/12/7 challenge that RSA Labs made (0x63DE7DC154F4D039).

PostPosted: Wed Oct 12, 2005 5:25 pm
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Malinky
Boot

Joined: 02 Aug 2005
Posts: 15

 		I think those missing chapters may be here:
ftp://ftp.nic.surfnet.nl/../pub/crypto/pgp/DES/
Hopefully I've missed no letters in this address Embarassed

Still no luck finding anything to help with a solve though

And just because it might come in handy one day:
http://www.theargon.com/archives/cryptography/

PostPosted: Thu Oct 13, 2005 9:03 am
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skenmy
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Joined: 22 Aug 2005
Posts: 96
Location: Essex, England
Malinky wrote:
I think those missing chapters may be here:
ftp://ftp.nic.surfnet.nl/../pub/crypto/pgp/DES/


They are just programs. Maybe we need to use them?
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 12:46 pm
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Hunting4Treasure
Unfettered


Joined: 06 Aug 2005
Posts: 385
Location: Tampa Bay Area, FL USA

 		Please forgive me if this has already been discussed. I admit, I don't understand most of what y'all are talking about! Embarassed

There are 176 pairs (352 bits). The pairs are equally divided by 16 = 11.
Could we possibly be looking for an 11-character answer, with each character being 16 pairs (32 bits) long? Or, is each character 32 pairs (64 bits), as suggested earlier? That would give us a 5½-character word... ??? Confused

Also, is there a table to show what each character is in RC5 code?
How many bits are there in each character? Explain in layman's terms, please. Wink
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 7:12 pm
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stuart437
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Joined: 27 Aug 2005
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Location: Herts, UK

 		oliverkeers13 Posted: 12th September 2005, 6:51 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We seem to have dismissed the idea that the top is a date too fast, as far as I am concerned. COmputers write dates in the form YY/MM/D. So the it COULD refer to the 8th of december 1964! NOt sure where this leaves us, though.



I have to agree with oliver i just got the card and it struck me as a date too. Showed the card to a couple of friends who are in programing and crypto and they dont recognise it. (though if it is i wont let them live it down) so on with the seamingly never ending google searches

PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 9:42 pm
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Hunting4Treasure
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Joined: 06 Aug 2005
Posts: 385
Location: Tampa Bay Area, FL USA

 		I can't ignore the little cows, though. One is the logo of the www.distributed.net site that cracked the RC5 code, mentioned several times on this thread. Go check it out.
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PostPosted: Fri Oct 14, 2005 11:06 pm
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oliverkeers13
Entrenched


Joined: 23 May 2005
Posts: 917
Location: London, UK

 		Something about that number strikes me as odd though, particularly in reference to www.distributed.net. The number on the card is
Quote:
64/12/18
and the number for the 64 bit encryption on distributed.net is
Quote:
32/12/8
. This strikes me as meaning that it ISN'T 64 bit encryption! I do remember Dan Hon saying at CubeFest that
Quote:
it started with a true/false proposition so simple that most people could solve it on a piece of paper
Could it just be base sixteen with numbers running
Quote:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
?
Anyway. I'll email them with the code and see what they make of it (even if we have done before(I really can't remember))
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PostPosted: Sat Oct 15, 2005 5:13 am
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