So we finally defeated the BBEG in our campaign; a feat that the party is quite proud of. While going through his things, we found a journal of his and our DM gave us an excerpt from it knowing that our party would have a field-day with the code (one of our players is an Actuary). I was wondering if anyone had an decryption software or is just really good with code that could help us out.
0834761512023321461734882712484862682022532584812241
2621132648823133220328627628648424013148547427415512
92552432840144894804712741
511444872211212104872351212031764812231494
8827715714548022720025525020924921005248717114423124
8282207279487362230484132330244217272018
(I have now copied the code exactly as it is in the journal exceprt that we recieved; I don't think that the spacing has anything to do with the actual code.)
This BBEG was a level 30 Rogue and a lower ranking member of the Garrott. He also ran his own assassin guild on the side which we brought down (one of the main goals of the campaign). We found the book on a small demi-plane hidden inside this magically protected cube. Again, it was in his journal which was entirely written in this sort of code. The rogue had not created the demi-plane, but he did use it as his base of operations. The only actual words written were on the inside of the front cover which said: "Property of Brutus". The pages themselves were not numbered and the book was just all this code without any spaces
Code:
The code was given to use typed. It was word-wrapped at the end of the line based on how it was printed so two of the lines were the same length and the last one was shorter. Both of my fellow PCs also very adamantly informed that the code is supposed to be one single line.
Party Makeup:
lvl15 Cleric (who has every rogue ability except sneak attack, no ACP and 56AC, 69AC in a suprise round)
lvl16 Sor (who cannot cast damage spells, he is an expert at crowd control, vow of peace, non-violence)
lvl15 Ranger (melee DPS guy, two weapon fighter)
lvl 15 Paladin (great tank, dragon-like mount)
lvl 15 Warlock (most boring class ever, lots of damage).
EDIT: If it is, it's got another code on top of it (Maybe just letters to numbers? Maybe modulo 26?). You'd have to get from numbers to letters before you could do any cracking.
I'm not much of a cracking expert, but that seems to me to be a potential solution.
08 34 76 15 12 02 33 21 46 17 34 88 27 12 48 48 62 68 20 22 53 25 84 81 22 41
26 21 13 26 48 82 31 33 22 03 28 62 76 28 64 84 24 01 31 48 54 74 27 41 55 12
92 55 24 32 84 01 44 89 48 04 71 27 41
51 14 44 87 22 11 21 21 04 87 23 51 21 20 31 76 48 12 23 14 94
88 27 71 57 14 54 80 22 72 00 25 52 50 20 92 49 21 00 52 48 71 71 14 42 31 24
82 82 20 72 79 48 73 62 23 04 84 13 23 30 24 42 17 27 20 18
Frequency analysis, however, disproves this (there is no pair popular enough to represent spaces; too many characters used only once). Only thing is certain, this is no modulo calculation — that would provide much more evenly distributed numbers.
00 00
01 01
02
03
04 04 04
08
11
12 12 12 12
13 13
14 14 14 14
15
17 17
18
20 20 20 20 20
21 21 21 21 21
22 22 22 22 22
23 23 23 23
24 24 24 24
25 25
26 26
27 27 27 27 27
28
30
31 31 31 31
32
33 33
34 34
41 41 41
42 42
44 44
46
48 48 48 48 48 48 48 48
49
50
51 51
52 52
53
54 54
55 55
57
62 62
64
68
71 71 71 71
72 72
73
74
76 76
79
80
81
82 82 82
84 84 84 84
87 87
88 88
89
92 92
94
(to British people: yes, I did watch Sherlock, how did you guess :P).
It could be a simple substitution (if each pair of numbers is a letter, then each must be there twice), but this is unlikely, since space should be the most popular (and so include 48 as one of the representations), and there are 2 48s in a row.
My money would be on a key added to each value, though either the substitution is complex, or there are 2 layers of keys, since the values range from 00 to 94.
Another (metagamey) option is to convert the whole thing to binary then ASCII, but that seems unlikely for a rogue in the D&D universe. (plus it's long enough to crash the online converters I found...)
[sblock:"our party in real life"]1an actuary, 2a biochemist whose in medical school, 3a chemist (myself) who did more math then chemistry in university, 4a mathematics instructor and two others that do not often attend. My point in telling you this is to show that although we are a fairly intelligent group, we don't know anything about computer programing. When it comes to figuring out some sort of software to decrypt this, we're like Paris Hilton in a gay bar.[/sblock]
1. Take each pair of numbers and divide by 100, turning them into a percentile.
2. Apply the percentile to the number 26.
3. After rounding to the nearest whole number, use simple substitution 0=space, 1=A, etc.
I've thought of another possible cipher, but I'm not sure if it would work in your case. I haven't tried it.
1. Take each pair of numbers and divide by 100, turning them into a percentile.
2. Apply the percentile to the number 26.
3. After rounding to the nearest whole number, use simple substitution 0=space, 1=A, etc.
1) if you're including spaces etc, then it's not going to be divided by 26, more likely 28 (alphabet + " " + ".") or 38 (that+digits).
2)this could possibly explain the large block around 20-27 in the pairs (suggesting 3-4 cyphertext pairs per plaintext symbol, which supports this idea (with 25-33 possibly symbols)), but that would point to a more shuffled substitution (space should be most common, followed by E)
Another point: there are some doubles in the paired sequence, if it is some form of substitution, there are only certain letters these can be (e, o, b, d, f, l, m, p, r, s, t), which may help to narrow it down.
This is intended to be solved, so is unlikely to be an unbreakable cypher (for example one with a full length key).
Another option is that the plaintext is put into the numeric pairs (00 - 2X), and then a numeric key added (such as 0123456789012345...), which would explain the number of paired values.
If so, then either the first value is ignored, or the key starts with a 0, since otherwise the cyphertext could not start with a 0.
Any clues as to part of the plaintext would be very useful in decoding this. Or possible numbers or phrases that could form the key (guild motto, chant of religious organisation, whatever). As stated, this is intended to be cracked, presumably without additional information, so there has probably been a clue somewhere if there is a key.
Try the telephone with 0 being space, Q, or Z.
Have you ever watched The Wire on HBO?
@Tedium: dami said that on the book's cover was the words "Property of Brutus". I keep thinking that this might be a key of some sort, but I could be completely wrong too.
Just to be clear, it was on the inside cover. Also, when I read this I said to myself "WhoTF is Dami?!?!... oHhhhhh!"
Thank you for all your suggestions; they've definetly got the wheels in my head turning.
To further helps us along:
pair frequency analysis:
48 => 18
12 => 12
24 => 8
21 => 8
27 => 8
20 => 8
22 => 8
14 => 7
23 => 7
32 => 7
72 => 6
71 => 6
82 => 6
02 => 6
31 => 5
62 => 5
25 => 5
84 => 5
42 => 4
44 => 4
51 => 4
87 => 4
28 => 4
41 => 4
15 => 4
17 => 4
11 => 4
13 => 4
I'm thinking it could be a stream cipher with "Property of Brutus" as the key. Maybe that helps, maybe not.
Maybe you could could ask the DM for some clues through the use of skill rolls, such as history (seen the cipher before), perception (see some unknown number pattern that we haven't seen yet), or even streetwise (ask around who Brutus was). The skills will not provide the solution, but hopefully a clue, like "Property of Brutus" is truely the key of the cipher, or what kind of cipher it is.
Assuming a single line:
Quads work - 0834 7615 1202 3321 ... etc.
or 3/1 - 083/4 761/5 120/2 332/1 (or reversed to 1/3, but the starting "0" makes that seem unlikely)
Trips work too - 083 476 151 202 332
Personally, I don't think it's a simple substitution. That would be too easy for the group you describe.
Just something to think about.
btw: "Property of Brutus" made me think of Julius Ceasar. You didn't find a dagger recently did you?
edit: Note to self - read all posts before replying. Astromath beat me to it lol.
I'd assume that you substitute a letter for a sequence of numbers, but it's possible that we have variable length encoding. Imagine huffman encoding, which would explain the near even distribution of numbers. Perhaps we could convert to binary and view the byte distribution, but that too seems too complex.
Seeing that there are 92 numbers perhaps we should find the factors and reshape the string of numbers and look for patterns.
html_removed
the factors of 92 are 1, 2, 4, 23, 46, and 92
the 23 and 4 are the closest we have to a square, and it's not that square.
There's also putting the first number in the center of a spiral and walking around the edge of your square placing numbers.
We still have the problem of parsing it. Perhaps one of these new configurations leads to each pair of digits being contained within 26, 28 or something like that to convert to letters.
Here's another way to view the Property of Brutus. That is the key and you find your letter offset by adding the offsets of how much do you have to circularly shift the alphabet right to get the a to the p position, add that shift to (how much do you need to get it then to the r position) add that shift to (how much do you then need to get it then to the o position)... and you have your final offset. If I am thinking right you simply need the shift of a->s as the final offset.
btw: "Property of Brutus" made me think of Julius Ceasar. You didn't find a dagger recently did you?
Heh, if only this was a Caesar cipher
Pretty sure that was Bluto not Brutus.
It was both.
[sblock"Further Questions that we asked the DM"]
During the next session one of the PCs asked the DM if any of the
characters repeat at the start of end of four random pages and the
page in question (say the first 5 characters) in the book. The DM
said that there was no obvious pattern at the end, but each of the
pages seems to start with 07 or 08.
Questioned about the third character, he said it different each time
in these pages. Questioned about the apparent difference between 07
and 08, he said that entries with 07 seem to be very short
comparatively. Asked about the 4th and 5th character for 08 entries,
he said that they always start with 47. However, no obvious pattern
can be seen past that point. When asked specifically, the number 48
appears to be present a lot on all of the sampled pages suggesting
some sort of substitution occurs.[/sblock]
[sblock"how we worked it out"]The PC then said his character
takes an hour to count the number of characters on those 5 pages and
see if it was even, a multiple of three, four or five. At least these
fives pages were found to have length that was a multiple of three.
The PC then had the idea of crossing out every third character to see
if there was a pattern in the remaining characters, partly under the
assumption that anything beyond a substitution cypher with padded
noise (or potentially another message in the padded space) would be
cruel and unusual of the DM to assign. Plus there were clearly some
repeating motifs.
Removing every third space and looking at couplets there were less
than 26 or so unique motifs suggesting this might be on to something:
08 47 15 20 33 14 17 48 27 24 48 26 20 25 25 48 22 12 21 32 48 23 33
20 28 27 28 48 24 13 48 47 27 15 12 25 24 28 01 48 48 47 27 15 14 48
22 12 21 48 23 12 20 17 48 22 14 48 27 15 14 48 22 20 25 25 20 24 21
05 48 17 14 23 24 28 20 27 48 36 23 48 13 33 24 21 27 01
Another PC realized realized that the frequency of 48 could represent
a space instead of a letter. Subsequently substituting each two digit
pair for a unique letter gave them letters to work with instead of
numbers (easier to work with for some) and we solved the substitution
cypher with the assistance of an online tool that lets you try
substitutions in real time.[/sblock]
[sblock"Final Solution"] 48 = " ", 15 = h, 20 = i, 33 = r, and so on.
Eventually went ended up with:
"0847hired to kill many prists of 47thalos01 47the man paid me the
million05 deposit up front01"
This was enough to solve the puzzle and the DM let us roll decipher
script to figure out the other characters since they were merely
formatting or special characters: 08 = start of a text entry, 05 = GP
symbol, 47 = next letter is capitalized, 01 = a period. He also said
that the 07 entries are likely account numbers but we're not sure of
that or the significance.
So the final message (fixing an unfortunately placed spelling mistake
in brackets) is:
"Hired to kill many pri(e)sts of Thalos. The man paid me the million
GP deposit up front."[/sblock]
Please note that most of this post was written by the Paladin in our party as he knew that I would want to share this with you guys. Sorry about the weird use of pronouns.
