6 ms·
Too hard?
- kator 14y agoWorking on a number of "gateway" challenges for a client. Not sure if this is too hard with zero hints. It's so hard to measure when you're the one who created the puzzle. I came up with a couple solutions but again how do you separate the personal bias of being the puzzle maker?
- kator 14y agoIf are attempting it please post your thoughts here. I will give more hints if nobody pops it.
- anonymous_ 14y agorsa-155
- kator 14y agoThe instructions are not encrypted they are interspersed at repeatable intervals.
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- anonymous_ 14y agoThe pattern has a width of 57 columns. The decoded text looks like the beginning of a private key to me.
- kator 14y agoIf you decode it you will know. :)
- anonymous_ 14y agoYes, I liked the challenge I'll take another shot tonight.
- kator 14y agoIf you decoded it then you should have the next steps??
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- edferda 14y agoA hint would be nice.
- kator 14y agoSee above for hits, it can be solved without any knowledge of the internal process used to display the free text.
- sebbi 14y agoSome form of BASEXY encoding XY not being 64? I see +,-,/,! and ":" in the text. Also spaces and newlines. BASE71?
- rachelbythebay 14y agoA md5sum of the first thing you create and then use along with 'step 2' would be a nice way to see if you're on the right track. Otherwise... it's hard to say exactly where things are going wrong.
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- givan 14y agohttp://xkcd.com/356/ http://xkcd.com/356/
- kator 14y agoFunny but this is a real challenge and it's solvable.
- kator 14y agoA couple hints: 1) You most likely won't solve it in a browser 2) The actual text is NOT encrypted 3) It will take 4 to 5 connections together to solve the problem
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- kator 14y agoUpdated to hopefully make it a bit clearer. Also there is an alternate challenge at izhack.com port 12346 but you can't read it in a browser. :)
- rachelbythebay 14y ago... just because you get a RSA thing (ahem) out of it doesn't mean it'll work with your "Step 2". Those things aren't armored, so it's possible to corrupt it and have no luck getting anywhere. Or did you intend for it to be straight-up frustrating?
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- kator 14y agoNo it's designed as a challenge not designed to be frustrating. Think of reasons you think you see cipher text in it.. And there is nothing 'armored' about this thing, it's so plainly in your face I'm stunned nobody had figured it out yet.
- anonymous_ 14y agoKator, have you read Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid?
- kator 14y agoIf you are trying to say I created a puzzle only I can solve you would be wrong. I have someone who solved it but they're into protocol analysis and crypto.
- anonymous_ 14y agoNo, I think it's solvable and even easy (depending on definition). Beforing you gave the tips I saw that "scrambled" trimmed the response always at the same byte length. Then I saw everytime it returned something different. Then, doing a "for i in $(seq 0 50); do curl izhack.com:12345 | head -7 | tail -1 | cut -c 1-250; done; I could see the pattern. Doing the same for the other lines, replacing head -7 with head -8, head -9, etc I grabbed the repetition columns for all 5 lines. Each line had different columns repeated. Creating a 5x300 grid and marking the cells where repetition occurs you see there's a symmetry. The repeats 5 times, where at column 58 every line repeats and it marks the repetition. This is where I left, I still don't know the meaning of the last line. When I first run, coincidentally the server returned "sAlt" :-) I was only asking if you knew the book because you seem to like puzzles and me too. As I liked the book I thought you might like and was trying to start a conversation. Sorry!
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- prout 14y agoIs figuring out a passphrase part of the step 2, or did I miss something ?