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Post by ironwill on Jan 26, 2019 22:51:41 GMT -5
Anyone getting anywhere with this. I have also taken a little time off. It was too frustrating and life has gotten busy with work. So I've tried reverse engineering the code. I thought that since the message is from Fenn to all the searchers, and it says something to knowing the location of the treasure, I made a high probability assumption that the message starts out as "The treasure is..." This is probably the highest chance beginning to the message that I could guess, so I input that and and reversed the numbers back to fit into the character string..... SU CCESS ISH IDDENINSID ETHE_ _ _ES_ _U_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _SVRWYULOKK OZMIEAYULF UT I ITYWBLB HKAV C A Z U AU T R E E A RMWXCLLQFRM JMYPJLSVLC USOKLLICTX BXACUHRBVG T H E T R E A S U R E I S H D U E C 41 10 73 22 80 28 76 6 32 53 61 19 1 36 56 23 65 40 13 67 29 2 21 45 39 3 79 51 E I N C E S D D I E S 49 24 27 11 17 69 4 71 50 5 30 57 25 7 60 35 12 20 8 70 52 26 62 42 14 54 31 9 33 72 55 37 15 58 75 66 43 74 68 59 16 46 34 18 77 63 44 64 78 38 47 48 Anyway to make a long explanation short, I was looking at the key phrase being "Success is hidden inside the..." (sounding like an inspirational quote that would be in her book). The only problem is the Red R's that have to fit later. Since my proposed key phrase has no R's, it would mean the phrase is not repetitive, but one single phrase." But don't worry about that. Because I recently found what kills this idea. if you look closely at the vigenere decryption character string of "Successishiddeninsidethe" ... ABPUUCTGSDGWJERSLCDCQABERNCXTATQNSKGXSWCUOFVDINBEEWUQMFSLRJRAOWJXRVZBDZVWKCZZUND the 21st character (in red) is Q. That means the phrase would now be "Success is hiddeninsi dQthe . That kills this phrase...I'll have to start over. I still think its possible that " The Treasure Is..." is the beginning of his message though.
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Post by fennster on Jan 26, 2019 23:04:45 GMT -5
This is the most frustrating thing I have ever done and I'm a Dolphins fan.
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Post by zaphod73491 on Jan 26, 2019 23:05:08 GMT -5
We've been told that when you have the correct keyphrase for decoding the result of the puzzle piece arrangement, there are no "confirmations" in the result -- presumably other than that it looks like scrambled English. So even though Jenny ~could~ have put a word or short phrase in here -- an Easter Egg if you will -- she didn't. So that tells me that her keyphrase doesn't start with "WORDS" because (as I wrote earlier) that decrypts to WHATG, and I'd call that a potential confirmation. Perhaps even more remarkable is that if the keyphrase starts with the word ONE, that decrypts to EIN -- i.e. "one" in German. The Chase loves to serve up its coincidences. Oh my goodness! A keyPHRASE?! I have been stuck on just keyWORDS this whole time with the cipher-ing of the letters. Oh my...this is going to take awhile. Thank you for letting me know. Hi Redraven: yep, unfortunately a keyword is ruled out because the periodicity would immediately become apparent. Even keywords up to 20 letters long would still get used 4 times -- sufficient to spot "leakage" of high frequency letters.
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Post by fennster on Feb 3, 2019 19:20:57 GMT -5
Anyone getting anywhere with this. I have also taken a little time off. It was too frustrating and life has gotten busy with work. So I've tried reverse engineering the code. I thought that since the message is from Fenn to all the searchers, and it says something to knowing the location of the treasure, I made a high probability assumption that the message starts out as "The treasure is..." This is probably the highest chance beginning to the message that I could guess, so I input that and and reversed the numbers back to fit into the character string..... SU CCESS ISH IDDENINSID ETHE_ _ _ES_ _U_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _SVRWYULOKK OZMIEAYULF UT I ITYWBLB HKAV C A Z U AU T R E E A RMWXCLLQFRM JMYPJLSVLC USOKLLICTX BXACUHRBVG T H E T R E A S U R E I S H D U E C 41 10 73 22 80 28 76 6 32 53 61 19 1 36 56 23 65 40 13 67 29 2 21 45 39 3 79 51 E I N C E S D D I E S 49 24 27 11 17 69 4 71 50 5 30 57 25 7 60 35 12 20 8 70 52 26 62 42 14 54 31 9 33 72 55 37 15 58 75 66 43 74 68 59 16 46 34 18 77 63 44 64 78 38 47 48 Anyway to make a long explanation short, I was looking at the key phrase being "Success is hidden inside the..." (sounding like an inspirational quote that would be in her book). The only problem is the Red R's that have to fit later. Since my proposed key phrase has no R's, it would mean the phrase is not repetitive, but one single phrase." But don't worry about that. Because I recently found what kills this idea. if you look closely at the vigenere decryption character string of "Successishiddeninsidethe" ... ABPUUCTGSDGWJERSLCDCQABERNCXTATQNSKGXSWCUOFVDINBEEWUQMFSLRJRAOWJXRVZBDZVWKCZZUND the 21st character (in red) is Q. That means the phrase would now be "Success is hiddeninsi dQthe . That kills this phrase...I'll have to start over. I still think its possible that " The Treasure Is..." is the beginning of his message though. This seems interesting. Hard for me to tell what your method is, but I want to get back to this. What are you guys thinking as of late?
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Post by zaphod73491 on Feb 4, 2019 0:17:55 GMT -5
Hi Fennster: my short answer is that the Vigenere stage is unsolvable without the correct keyphrase, which is to say that without Jenny's book, no cryptanalyst could crack her 80-letter sequence. It is basically a one-time pad.
If it were perhaps twice as long, I could solve it by simultaneously solving the key and Forrest's message via hill-climbing -- a somewhat complex crypto technique. But 80 letters isn't enough -- or at least not enough for my crypto code arsenal.
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Post by ironwill on Feb 7, 2019 12:19:18 GMT -5
"I used to be an reverse engineer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee." All jokes aside I feel your pain. I also hurt my knee (probably, meniscus and an interior ligament) while, coincidentally, downhill skiing in Santa Fe a few years ago. Pain comes and goes, disappearing at times, but I know it will come back to haunt me in the future. Hope you can get yours fixed and GL on the puzzle. Being a gamer, I took joy in that quote...which not many understand About my knee, after 3 weeks it disappeared after some "crunching and popping." My doctor said he's about 90% sure I have whats called a "floater" piece of cartilage or tissue around my knee that slipped into the knee joint. The crunching either broke it up or spit it out, and my knee is now at 85% healthy. Few more days of healing from surrounding tendons and such. This makes sense because I tore something in that knee 2 years ago and just "pushed" through it.
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Post by fennster on Feb 7, 2019 16:09:29 GMT -5
Has everyone given up for now on this? I lost heart but I want to get back into it. I'm honestly just not sure where to go from here.
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Post by zaphod73491 on Feb 7, 2019 21:07:55 GMT -5
Hi Fennster: speaking for myself, yes, I've totally lost interest. It is not a fair puzzle.
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Post by ironwill on Feb 7, 2019 22:29:37 GMT -5
Hi Fennster: speaking for myself, yes, I've totally lost interest. It is not a fair puzzle. Me too...no point in chasing something that probably has no bearing on the Chase. To me..."interesting" is not enough of an answer to it's importance in the Chase... considering, if it were "IMPORTANT" then Jenny would not have encoded it. Why? Because she would be partially responsible for the next death that occurred in the hunt for his treasure, because she "hid" information that could have ended Fenn's hunt before that person passed. We all have to understand that we are responsible to each other. So my best logic tells me ...no, Jenny would not do this. I'll stick with Genetic Blend's take on the final message that he was able to uncover....it's not anything special.
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Post by harrytruman on Feb 7, 2019 22:47:22 GMT -5
Has everyone given up for now on this? I lost heart but I want to get back into it. I'm honestly just not sure where to go from here. I'd be happy to have a hint or nudge in the right direction, but short of that, it seems like a waste of time to just cycle through hundreds of possible keyphrases, hoping to get lucky. I like the mental challenge. Plugging in phrase after phrase started to seem kind of mindless, and finding the right phrase that way would just be a fluke.
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Post by brydena on Feb 7, 2019 23:34:57 GMT -5
Yeah. I’m not quite at quitting point yet. Yet. Hey, if we take a correct step and mail it to her, she’ll let us know if the step was correct?
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Post by justsomerando on Feb 8, 2019 9:57:47 GMT -5
I have some ideas I'm going to try this weekend. I've created a corpus of Fenn Quotes from Mysterious Writings as well as scrapbooks and I think its possible to perform a brute force attack on it. If the code written is custom, the decrypting stage can include the final step of applying the 1-80 transposition. I'm a hobby programmer and will program something along the lines of this: practicalcryptography.com/cryptanalysis/stochastic-searching/cryptanalysis-vigenere-cipher-part-2/Using QuadGrams from the custom Fenn corpus I've created, I think its possible to attempt this. Each k permutation with repetitions on a group of four is 456,976 perms. Bucketizing the 80 character ciphertext into 20 4 character "buckets" yields only 9,139,520 total attacks, and combining the highest scoring quadgram buckets should be fairly trivial. I'll let you know how it goes and upload any code I'll create to a github account.
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Post by brydena on Feb 8, 2019 12:50:10 GMT -5
Are you planning on applying the attack to all SVRWY, MKATG and MTYCU?
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Post by Jenny on Feb 8, 2019 13:05:11 GMT -5
So you all want a clue? You can just ask you know. No one has. I'll release a clue at the end of March! Until then know that the correct order of letters has been confirmed--- and all that needs done is the Vigenere Cipher to provide a different set of letters to rearrange with the last page of numbers. There were clues for all this within the book which are being missed..... No matter, all will be revealed soon! You should realize, many puzzles, like Kryptos for example, go on for YEARS.... it's been a few months. And I've been more than willing to help those who wanted it. So you know the process: 1)Puzzle Pieces give letters via a book code (clues understood for this) 2)Those letters rearranged by Magic Square (clues mostly found for this) 3)Vigenere Cipher applied (clues for this missed) 4)rearrange again by numbers on back page SOLVED!
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Post by ironwill on Feb 8, 2019 14:44:10 GMT -5
So you all want a clue? You can just ask you know. No one has. I'll release a clue at the end of March! Until then know that the correct order of letters has been confirmed--- and all that needs done is the Vigenere Cipher to provide a different set of letters to rearrange with the last page of numbers. There were clues for all this within the book which are being missed..... No matter, all will be revealed soon! You should realize, many puzzles, like Kryptos for example, go on for YEARS.... it's been a few months. And I've been more than willing to help those who wanted it. So you know the process: 1)Puzzle Pieces give letters via a book code (clues understood for this) 2)Those letters rearranged by Magic Square (clues mostly found for this) 3)Vigenere Cipher applied (clues for this missed) 4)rearrange again by numbers on back page SOLVED! Jenny we appreciate you giving out a clue on it, but know the reason no one has asked you for a clue (at least my best guess) is pride. We don't want to seem "weak" coming to the author asking for another clue. I guess a lot of us would just rather hold on to our dignity and assume the end is not worth the effort...and just leave it, instead of asking for help where we know a few did not and solved it.
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