unforum

[kian]

A few more ideas to throw out...

[TekkiBreki]

An idea I've been playing with the past few days is that the 108 characters are a 54-character key and a 54-character cipherstream interleaved in some linear fashion (shuffled).

I've explored riffle in- and out-shuffles using the formulas for where the kth card would end up after successive shuffles to calculate which of the 108 characters would be the first 10 of the key and ciphertext. I passed these to the right hand side of the Bruce Schneier applet and consistently got junk.

I performed two "decryptions" per sample so it would not matter whether the original order was key-ciphertext or ciphertext-key. I sampled down to 9 shuffles since entropy begins to diminish after a point. I think Schneier's writeup recommended 7 shuffles to maximize entropy in a 52-card deck. The writeup on riffle shuffles at Wolfram MathWorld recommended 8 or 9 for a 52-card deck.

[themandotcom]

Maybe we can try to write some kind of crib dragging program with words like "professor kiteway", "Dijinn Worm" or "Created" or something like that and get a partial keystream. Then due to the fact that it is 108 characters, we can get its corresponding letter

EX:


1-5 letters:WBBMC

55-60 letters:RXIHG

So if we guess that WBBMC is profe (partial professor kiteway)

So WBBMC
+ profe
13 20 17 19 8 would be the keystream for that.

So since, at least I think that the 55-60 should be the same keystream right?
So RXING-
13 20 17 19 8
is Whatever... dont feel like doing the math, but probably not right

Maybe a programmer can try to make a program like that, though it would be nececarry to check manually, but that shouldn't be that because there is about 96 possiblilities. Maybe we can start a suffled.tk lol! Assault on Shuffled! Anyway I digress

[brokasaphasia]

[anneinedu2]

New Idea (I believe this may be important)

[anneinedu2]

More on my last message

[anneinedu2]

Also

[GinGenie]

Following on from what justdig mentioned, the deck of cards can be used to generate a 108 length key in other ways too. As well as ten hearts, king spades being TH, KS, it could also become 10H, 13S. So starting with an untouched deck, 1-k clubs, hearts etc would generate a key something like 1C 2C 3C, which would be 1, 3, 2, 3, 3, 3, which could be added or subtracted from the WBBMC HGFIB sequence of letters.

It might also be that the jokers are implying that we need a 54 length key, which could be generated just from the placing of the cards, so 1 clubs and queen of hearts becomes 1 and 25, depending on the original deck order. A 54 length cipher text can be created by adding pairs of letters together WB = Y , or taking the first letter from the second etc.

The anagram shuffled x fourth prime (nearly) might be instructions to shuffle the deck of cards seven times to produce the key. The -2 letters at the end of the anagram could either be suggesting a ROT-2 of the whole text, and to look out for double encryption, or to remove two letters from either end of the WBBMC sequence so that there is only a 104 (52) length key/cipher text to look for, which avoids any problems with jokers. Perfect shuffles produce very unrandom results, but could still be a key.

Unfortunately I have tried most variations of this and came up with zilch.

I have also tried 'shuffling' and 'unshuffling' the WBBMC sequnce, both as a 108 letter sequence, and in 54 pairs. Using both 'in' and 'out' methods. Again, zilch. However, this was done by hand, and I only checked the first 5-10 letters, so it may be I've missed something.

Something I tried earlier relating to the solitaire cipher was to find a way of relating the WBBMC sequence to a solitaire deck order, which was difficult as there were only 52 different pairs of letters. This, however, is not so much of a problem as I thought. If the playing cards are numerically valued at 1-52, and jokers A and B are 53 and 54, then in modulo 52 jokers A and B are 1 and 2. The pairs of letters that are repeated in the WBBMC sequence are SM and VM, which are adjacent when the pairs of letters are listed alphabetically (last letter first), so SM VM could relate to 1C, 2C at the beginning and Joker A and Joker B at the end, and the pairs of letters in between in alphabetical order could be the order of the untampered deck. This would give four different deck orders to try.

I tried this when it was still unknown whether the EODMF sequence was cipher text, though obviously it isnt. It is still possible that this could be used to order the deck, even though the WBBMC sequence also has to be the cipher text. As using pairs of letters to generate a single cipher text letter, there are 52 options, ie to produce A you could use AZ BY CX... ZA YB XC etc which I believe gives enough scope for variation to use the pairs of letters for both cipher text and deck order. This is all only hypothesis, and may be off track completely!

I thought I'd share, as I am off on holiday in two days (hurrah), and I am absolutely, certainly, definitely not going to take cards with me.

Maybe....

[BBuck]

Re: New Idea (I believe this may be important)

[alton]

Ok, seen only some of the posts to this card, and not sure if this has been suggested, and I think I'll probably sound stupid for suggesting this, but Von's hint states "Examine the card more closely. If you're feeling cold, you're overly sensitive, as for the code, everything you need is 'there' ". What if "there" is a keyword. (*thinks back to "speak 'friend' and enter") Like I said, probably not the best idea but thought I'd throw it out there anyway.

[BBuck]

[sirichj]

Has anyone tried ICE SLOWLY or SLOWLY ICE as the passkey?

I know it's been mentioned before but has it been tried as the passkey as on the other posts didn't say? Maybe it's worth freezing the card to see if anything happens?

Worth a try !

[Guin]

[Asib]

A Long Winded Ramble of Thoughts

[Cinana]

Asib,
hmmm...alot of that makes sense. I am going to still stay with the Solitaire theory, and see what your ideas come up with.
The enigma code also looks very promising. Gonna have to look into that too, even if its just to learn about it.

No fishes for you.