[Wolves] Coder breaking

[baza]

On Thu, 2006-11-30 at 17:21 +0000, Peter Evans wrote:
> On Thursday 30 November 2006 13:10, baza wrote:
> > 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)."
> 
> Baza,
> 
> Is the above the quote you got from the person posting the problem?  I have to 
> ask because I'm not sure where your text finished and the quote began.
> 
> Is there more context to this that you are willing to share with us, in 
> particular I'd like to know what the last sentence relates to.
> 
> Perhaps the talk of a Caesar cipher has been a bit of a 
> mistake on our part.  My assumption now is that it's a 'simple substitution 
> cipher' (my interpretation about each plaintext having only one ciphertext 
> equivalent rules out a one-time pad), so the key length is 26!, on the 
> assumption that the alphabet is a..z (or A..Z, whichever).
> 
> Providing us with information about the first word tells us that it's seven 
> letters with no letter repeated.  I did a little research ( on 
> http://www.morewords.com/unique-letters/ ) it shows at least 7694 words in 
> the English language that fits this description.
> 
> It's still a pretty tall order to brute-force or dictionary attack this one 
> even with the information provided.  And generating and reading all the 
> possible combinations that result is beyond my enthusiasm at the moment, not 
> to mention ability.
> 
> Additionally by converting the digits to numbers and collapsing them I think 
> there's been some uncertainty added into the ciphertext.  There are three 
> occasions when three digit sequences cannot be separated by the application 
> of a deterministic rule (225 occurs twice and 224 once) these could represent 
> one of two different character or a three character combination (225 could be 
> 22, 5 or 2, 25 or 2, 2, 5).  Even with the correct key the plain text could 
> have been one of three possible inputs, although only one may make 
> actual 'sense'.

This is the quote

" 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)."


There's no 'hidden' subtext here lol. The last sentence relates to my
passing on the lug 'chat' about this code. And my own thoughts on what
encryption was used. The person who posted the code in the first place
did it on a forum where I was talking about the WW2 German codes, and I
posted a simple message encrypted using a simple code, which he cracked,
and posted his by way of, 'I bet you won't break this one'

Hope that helps


Baz
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