Any cryptologists out there?

[Pennycook]

I'm no cryptologist, but I'm attempting to work on the following encrypted message:
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All I can say for sure is that it has been wrapped every 72 characters, so that'll have to be taken out before any decryption can take place. Other than that, though, I don't really know where to start. If I knew how to go about decrypting it I'd do it myself, but can't see anything obvious; it's not a substitution and all of ciphers I thought of didn't work.

If there are any cryptologists out there, or anybody who's generally interested in codes and such, I'd appreciate some help, even a point in the right direction. Does it look like any particular kind of encryption that I could research?

Cheers in advance.

[jamena]

looks like what you might see in a text editor if you used it to open up a jpeg...

This wasn't an email you got was it? picture attachment gone wrong...

[Pennycook]

looks like what you might see in a text editor if you used it to open up a jpeg...

This wasn't an email you got was it? picture attachment gone wrong...

Nah, there aren't enough strange characters for it to be anything like that.

It's not an e-mail I got, no; I'm part of a roleplaying forum and the admins have put that up as a decrypted message. I'm really interested in what it says and Tripple suggested you guys.

[herulach]

How do you know its not a substitution cypher for a start? First thing would be to unwrap and lower case, then tally up the occurences of each character, google should provide you with frequency tables for each letter, match it up and hopefully youll be able to understand enough of it to make the leap for the rest of the messages.

Is it likely to be a complex machine cipher? Ie is the roleplay future/present/medieval? If its a machine cipher i wouldnt even know where to start, except with relatively simple ones like enigma, that freeware decryption stuff exists for.

[Pennycook]

How do you know its not a substitution cypher for a start? First thing would be to unwrap and lower case, then tally up the occurences of each character, google should provide you with frequency tables for each letter, match it up and hopefully youll be able to understand enough of it to make the leap for the rest of the messages.

Is it likely to be a complex machine cipher? Ie is the roleplay future/present/medieval? If its a machine cipher i wouldnt even know where to start, except with relatively simple ones like enigma, that freeware decryption stuff exists for.

Somebody else tallied up the letter frequencies:

A-30 a-23
B-27 b-17
C-32 c-15
D-15 d-22
E-34 e-27
F-25 f-21
G-25 g-23
H-30 h-24
I-21 i-27
J-15 j-24
K-24 k-21
L-28 l-17
M-23 m-20
N-24 n-17
O-22 o-19
P-18 p-29
Q-21 q-30
R-16 r-28
S-21 s-15
T-20 t-14
U-22 u-27
V-30 v-33
W-22 w-27
X-25 x-18
Y-20 y-26
Z-20 z-21

0-20
1-30
2-28
3-20
4-26
5-24
6-28
7-22
8-16
9-24

/-18
+-21

But they all seem to be too close to indicate a substitution?

EDIT: I suppose that the best way to describe it is slightly futuristic, though the admins will have used a cipher that we will be able to decrypt. Whatever it is, it will have been encrypted by a machine in the roleplay, but last year exactly the same thing happened and it was a simple cipher. Not this year though, apparently. Heh.

[Funkstar]

To me it looks like it is mime encoded. I think you used to be able to do this in WinZip: save the portion of text to a file then just open it with WinZip. You would then be able to extract the un-encoded portion.

Worth a try at least, should only take a couple of min

(had to do this some times on newsgroups, this it was fractals at the time, lol)

[Stoo]

initially it looks a bit like a file hash?

[Pennycook]

To me it looks like it is mime encoded. I think you used to be able to do this in WinZip: save the portion of text to a file then just open it with WinZip. You would then be able to extract the un-encoded portion.

Worth a try at least, should only take a couple of min

(had to do this some times on newsgroups, this it was fractals at the time, lol)

Well, I'll have to find a version of WinZip first. Lol.

[Stoo]

Hmm, could it be PGP encoded?

mQCNAzuarOIAAAEEAKvJuxlwcVfu9+jVpL+Jf8/q/aAAoDKvTuhL32pB5mrq4wnk
EzSthZ1ErOcJ0yUGedSMJLF2rl+k+22Zwf5Guio74f3HRAIYgjUX6SMNWylU4/Ax
iyOu6I9Gw/fZImZNFmK+CaYFUoZv5i8qO5Gyto6TUrcd9qlSeJCr1f2GXCalAAUR
tA5CZWFsZSBTY3JlYW1lcokAlQMFEDu+peuQq9X9hlwmpQEB/JAEAJJqniXqQL1z
9ZARMeyGGkBxRYww/LndcBMRM+rLmsQcz/UzGmqXJtJZcl4FAiGNitlbuppeFChN
tATxUlRsKcmLZ6zauaTj0r2eVd84toZFxILu6gul9y3iKOVoo6MHQen14jbD1KBv
SYyQQS3PAMiUrLVav9cEJbIBz5p/zvlS

Looks v.similar non?

[Norky]

initially it looks a bit like a file hash?

You wouldn't be able to recover a hash though, unless the people who posted it are just playing a prank

Content-transfer-encoding: base64

I believe this is the encryption used, I'm working to solve it atm

[Stoo]

You wouldn't be able to recover a hash though, unless the people who posted it are just playing a prank

Content-transfer-encoding: base64

I believe this is the encryption used, I'm working to solve it atm

it's not base64 - http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/base64.php

it comes out as junk

[Norky]

it's not base64 - http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/base64.php

it comes out as junk

Well that's gone down the pan.

[Pennycook]

Hmm, could it be PGP encoded?



Looks v.similar non?

That does look very similar. Thing is, looking at WinZip's four methods of encryption, it also looks very like XXencoded, BinHex and MIME.

The journal calls it 'X-Altercation', but as far as I can tell it's nonsense.

[Stoo]

I was wondering if it's a pgp public block to decrypt another document? or perhaps the pgp block to be decoded, in which it's missing the public key?

[Pennycook]

I was wondering if it's a pgp public block to decrypt another document? or perhaps the pgp block to be decoded, in which it's missing the public key?

I think it's more likely to be the PGP block to be decoded. As for the key, then there are quite a few possibilities, unfortunately.

EDIT: I don't know if it will help at all, but throughout the entire roleplay thus far, the people that have put up this encrypted message have almost chanted: 'SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN'. Taking the first letter of each syllable gives 'STCICITT', which could be an 8 letter key, I guess.

[Pennycook]

*Sigh.*

Still gotten nowhere.

EDIT: Well, I've found out how to get WinZip to decrypt stuff, but unfortunately it won't do it unless I tell it how it's encrypted and put a specific header in the file. Of course, I don't know how it's encrypted and have no idea what the correct header is.