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[Wolf]

Maybe we'll get another e-mail slap in the head from our 7331 h4x0rz again.

Krystyn, check your PMs. I'm coming to Chicago this weekend.

[krystyn]

Roger that, Wolf.

I would almost say that we've used up our e-mail h4xor connections. They have been more than generous, and I know I feel as though I've personally let caesar and the gang down by not being more timely with the solves.



What's tripping up my puzzle-challenged brain right now is that there isn't an obvious corollary to the Mu game, since we pretty much never had steg, except for that one gimme I put into Paintover in order to appease the steg-hungry masses (the file cabinet image). Later, I did insert text into a caesar image, but it was just stuck into the data all raw and stuff.


ETA: the only other thing that occurs to me is Morse code. Perhaps reading from top-to-bottom, left-to-right might yield some sort of message? My gut says it's nothing of the kind, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

[spriggan]

were there any kinds of hardcore cryptography (not steg) puzzles in the original game? i'm thinking the 128bit key.dat, the reference to JPEG compression as the encryption method, and that the image is called data.jpg are pretty big hints for somebody that knows more about this kind of stuff.

[GWing_02]

[GWing_02]

Okay, so I'm doing a little more searching on JPEG compression as an encryption tool. Here's some results...

[spriggan]

from what i understand of steg (what i have learned in the past few days), using a plain black image to hide another file is a dead giveaway; you generally want to use images with a lot of detail. so i'm guessing that the fact that the image is all black a bit of obvious garbage, that we're supposed to get the hint that this is a stegged image.

i base64'd key.dat to get a decent looking key (is that the right thing to do?), then used jpseek with that key to try to desteg the image, but got garbage. however, i am using the linux version, so maybe the windows version is different. anybody want to try? here is the base64'd key.dat:

dBwNEhIEFRwNFxsaFQ8HCw==

if this is a shoutout to the paintover puzzle, maybe we should try using the same destegging method that solved that one.

[GWing_02]

I don't think base-64'ing the key is a good idea. you now have a 192-bit key instead of the sensical 128-bit key we had before. Just because the key wasn't all characters doesn't mean it wasn't valid. The bit data just didn't happen to be defined as a readable character in ASCII.

[spriggan]

[AnthraX101]

[spriggan]

[krystyn]

oh nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

[GWing_02]

AGH. WHY didn't I make that connection? I was just DOING XORs in C++ today (assignment due in 4 months... I'm a little ahead). WHY am I always 4 steps behind in every puzzle in this game!?