[Wolves] Coder breaking

[baza]

On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 10:16 +0000, chris procter wrote:
> --- Ron Wellsted <ron at wellsted.org.uk> wrote:
> 
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> > 
> > A couple of points:
> > 
> > 1/ are we certain these are decimal numbers?
> > 
> > Scanning the string there are NO nines, thus it
> > could be in base 9, so
> > if the +4 rotation is correct we would have to do
> > modulo arithmetic in
> > the correct base.  This could be base 9 or 10.
> > 
> > 2/ Should it be read left to right?
> > 
> > working on the principal of pairs we get
> > 82 26 20 14 35 14 31 02 04 22 57 32 24 14 31 04 17
> > 18 10 18 54 62 25
> 
> When you read it left to right then 19 out of 23 of
> the digraphs begin with a 0-3 which puts them in a a=1
> .. z=26 area (plus numbers), whereas if you read the
> stream right to left then only 9 out of 23 fall in
> that area with the other 14 in the 4-8 range and with
> a much flatter distribution. Which implies that we are
> reading them the right way round.
> 
> An interesting point is that the digraphs that fall
> outside the 00-39 range fall at positions 1,10,20 and
> 21 which seems quite regular so they could be control
> characters or checksums (the "62" at position 21 is an
> oddity that may be padding or perhaps combined with 20
> makes CRLF). 
> 
> There are a number of other patterns in there as well
> that give me a good feeling about pairs and this not
> being that complicated a code (once we understand it
> obviously!), the number 14 appears 3 times ('e'
> possibly?) and '14 31' appears twice ('es' or 'et'?)

The person who posted me this code challenge has responded to what we
have so far, i said it was a first-order encryption (each plaintext
letter has only one cipher equivalent) and i certainly wouldn't post
indecipherable material here. 

the only dirty trick i played was running the digits together - but you
seem to be more than halfway to working out how to deal with that. 

anyway, this is what the first word would look like properly spaced: 

8 22 6 20 14 3 5 

this should nearly tell you what the range of the cipher is
(congratulations on your hypotheses so far)."

"
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