Codebreakers, help me!

[doubleplus]

I was sifting through my normal link spam today, and someone ended up sending me to:
http://www.thew0rld.com/ - I figured it was some lame hell.com ripoff, and on a hunch I viewed the source. Here's what I found:

Code:

  OH. VIEWING THE SOURCE? THINK U R A L33T HAXXOR?
  UP TO A CHALLENGE LAM3R? THINK YOU'RE READY TO OWN?

--------------------------------------------------------
E O V L Y   Z U J K I G V H   U A X D   M H Z U U
S N V   F N W   L M O   X R D   B N Y F   Q Q V X M
H S R   N Z B W   S F   E N Z   R H O Q Z   P Q L
F O W   V P R I Y   Z I F Q   C I   A M T J C C I C K W
P F C T   A Z T J   S X   Z X B K B   A H
T G Y O C A P M S L O   S B   W M R J 0 J A A   E I D
B Q P   T F   S R R U D   K X O L   O G L J T   V E L V
K R C E   V P G   M R F S A   X B B F   F F Y   P Z C
J J S G   O C H L   D D   E J X R 0 Y S J   N K P V X D
V K F A E   J R T J P K   R B S P   Q N R A H   I O A
--------------------------------------------------------

FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS FOR FABULOUS PRIZES. IF YOU CAN.

                                        SIGNED,

                                          GRIEFER CYPHER

I've been playing with it a bit, but I don't have the brain to really crack it by hand. Any ex-military geeks want to give it a shot with me?

[Samwise]

I don't think it's a straight cipher.  Maybe a cipher plus every word is backwards...?  That looks a little more promising.

[Evil Elvis]

The DD is what sticks out to me the most.  Assuming this coded word isn't some initial, you'd have to wonder what it could be.  

Possiblities that come to mind:
1) DD stands for it's own word, in which case the code becomes very hard to crack
2) We're only meant to evaluate one of the D's.  Maybe the first or last letter in a group is supposed to be dropped.

[Alkiera]

AH
CI
DD
SB
SF
SX
TF

All the two-letter 'words'.

the presence of 'DD' would indicate it's not a simple substitution.  I can't think of any two letter english words with the same letter.  It's either a progressive substitution, or something more complex.

--
Alkiera

[Samwise]

The 0s are also interesting.  I suspect that they translate into punctuation, which for one wildly exciting instant made me think that the code involved "one place to the right on the keyboard", but that seems like a dead end.

[Romp]

dont think each of those groups of letters translates into an English word.  You see a lot of 3 letter words in a row, that seems weird, and of all the 3 letter words, none are repeated, which is also a little unusual, you would expect to see either 2 of 'and', 'you' or 'the' most likely in a sentence that size.

It would be too easy anyway if that were the case.

[ajax34i]

It can be English, sort of.  Remember that the message is about following the instructions, and as such may contain things like a web or email address.  www has 3 of the same letter in a row, for example.

Also, the thew0rld.jpg picture contains leet speak, and so does the teaser above the cryptography, so it's possible that he used pwn, u, r, and other combinations like that in the message.

Counting spaces, there are 28 symbols used.  I'm inclined to add a space at the end of every line, and count that as part of the cypher (which seems to be written in the normal left-aligned paragraph format), but I didn't yet.

There are 2 0's.  Least often used character.  Most often used is the space (no reason why "space" can't be a letter, and have A for example be a space).

[Shannow]

could be numbers to.

[Morfiend]

could be numbers to.

Thinking of l33t speak and the "DD", the only thing that comes to mind is "GG".

Donno if that helps.

[Soukyan]

could be numbers to.

Thinking of l33t speak and the "DD", the only thing that comes to mind is "GG".

Donno if that helps.

KK?

[Paelos]

I don't think its a direct translation from letter to letter.

Too many letters are doubled immediately, but never repeatedly.
UU
QQ
CC
AA
RR
BB
FF
JJ
DD

Those are all in the code, some at the beginning of the word if the blanks mark word beginnings and endings. To my knowledge, common english words don't begin with two like letters. There are exceptions like eerie or Aaron, but not many, and they are all vowels. So if that's the case, QQ is definetly a vowel if its direct, but I doubt it is.

[Moroni]

Hello. i've lurked alot but stuff like this just rules.

I think we might need to entertain the possiblity that we're lookinga t something that's doubly encrypted. The bulk of double letters causes me to think the encryption has been run through at least two ciphers. That makes this incredibly tough, but I don't think it's impossible. Afterall someone wrote it.

You might be on to something with the "KK" double letter, though. Perhaps we could try to isolate a "KK THX" and work from there.

[Murgos]

It could be a couple of different ciphers and still have double letters like that.  Viginere ciphers, permutation ciphers and block ciphers come immediately to mind.  I'll bust out my codes and ciphers book (read as Modern Applied Algebra) over the weekend and take a crack at some statisical analysis of it but chances are I will need to get access to MAPLE and some serious study and review if its any sort of serious cypher and not just some dingbat messing around.

Fortunately it doesn't resemble RSA, DES or AES (or ElGamal) otherwise you could forget ever breaking it in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable amount of effort.

[SirBruce]

Yes, I fooled around with it for a while thinking it might be an Enigma code.  But without a key I had no luck just guessing.

The fact that each line has 26 or less letters might be relevant.

Bruce

[Murgos]

Yeah, I was thinking enigma also, just because thats the kind of thing people who post stuff like that tend to think is neat.  Maybe after dinner I'll spend an hour or so fooling with it instead of playing video games.

[Romp]

even if you have an enigma machine you can't even crack it without a key... although I guess there might be a clue as to what the key is

[doubleplus]

Still no luck here. A few other friends have been playing with it as well but to no avail. One of them has been writing some code trying to brute force the thing, but I'm too much of a purist to want to go digital on something that's probably a lot more simple than I think it is.

[Murgos]

There are 3 rotors with inputs that are permutations of 0 - 25 and a reflector with a set of disjoint 2-cycles in an Enigma machine.  The rotors need merely be set to the proper initial setting, checking every possible initial rotor setting is easy with modern computing power, the difficult part is determining the set of disjoint 2-cycles on the rotor but a good algorithm and some CPU cycles can solve that problem too.  Don't give the enigma too much credit its hardly "can't even crack it without a key".

The algorithm used to create codes for an enigma is very well understood, infact I have a copy of one, but I'm sure you could google it up in a few minutes.  The kicker about the enigma is that you decode it exactly as you encode it, so if you wanted to write a quick algorithm to create random permutations 0-25 and sets of values for the reflector you could start your computer chugging away at it tonight.

Anyway, I passed this little bit of ciphertext on to a professor I know who teaches classes at the local U on ciphers and codebreaking to see what he has to say on it.

[Malderi]

So cool what happens when you present a challenge to a bunch of computer nerds ;-)

(Oh, and I have no idea.)

[SirBruce]

Well, I tried some internet-based Enigma programs but didn't have any success.  Couldn't find any that would actually do a brute-force decode.

Bruce

[Moroni]

I'm just guessing but I don't think it's an enigma code. That's too easy, because so many people would know to look for it. Whatever this guy is hiding, I hope it's worth the work.

[Polysorbate80]

Call me cynical, but I'd wager a sack of donuts it's just a hash of gibberish to screw with people's heads :)

[Secundo]

Call me cynical, but I'd wager a sack of donuts it's just a hash of gibberish to screw with people's heads :)

I tend to agree. "It's signed by Cypher Griefer".

[Moroni]

Someone I sent this link to said he found another page with more source to look at but he won't tell me how to find it because I'm 'not l33t enough' and he 'wants teh pr1z3s' for himself.

This thing succeeds in turning everyone into riddle toting script kiddies.

[Samwise]

Ph33r!

http://www.thew0rld.com/clue/

MAYBE THIS WILL BE EASIER...

-------------------------------------------------------
F M C M   O K E M A   X F M   J M M Q M V S
Z W X   T   X F T V Q   D K W C M   L R R   R L E M
A K   D K W   G M X   L   O R W M
X F M   V L E M   K I   X F M   G L E M

T X A   Z M M V   A F T I X M S   L V S   X J T A X M S
R T Q M   L   B T G M V M C M
L V S   X C L I I T O   T A   G C K J T V G   A T V O M
T X A   F T S T V G   X F M C M

H W A X   K V M   A F T Z Z K R M X F
Z W X   E K C M   X F L V   K V M   Q M D
X K   E L Q M   T X   F L C S M C
A X T R R   R M A A   F L C S   X F L V   X F C M M
--------------------------------------------------------

10.15.04.CYPHER

[Volm]

--------------------------------------------------------
HERE COMES THE WEEKEND
BUT I THINK YOURE ALL LAME
SO YOU GET A CLUE
THE NAME OF THE GAME

ITS BEEN SHIFTED AND TWISTED
LIKE A VIGENERE
AND TRAFFIC IS GROWING SINCE
ITS HIDING THERE

JUST ONE SHIBBOLETH
BUT MORE THAN ONE KEY
TO MAKE IT HARDER
STILL LESS HARD THAN THREE
--------------------------------------------------------

[SirBruce]

"Shibboleth" is Judges 12:5.  It's a "codeword" in the Bible.

Bruce

[schild]

I'm gonna work on this over the weekend, but I'm pretty sure the first step is removing all the vowels and using VLY = THE as a base to work from. There seems to be enough of the V, L, and Y through the piece that this may seem correct.

This is just cursory. By noon tomorrow I may have gone a completely different direction.

Edit: VLY can't be the. Unless VPG = TWO or a possible h4x0r word. Though, I don't know which it could be.

[Volm]

Look up vigenere in google. I found a decent page explaining how the cipher was broken in the olden days.

[schild]

Look up vigenere in google. I found a decent page explaining how the cipher was broken in the olden days.

http://math.ucsd.edu/~crypto/java/EARLYCIPHERS/Vigenere.html

There's an applet. Unfortunately there's a first layer of encryption that needs breaking, then running it through that applet should make it easy.

[Volm]

Also found one at http://makcoder.sourceforge.net/demo/vigenere.php that would be handy if when we find the first and second key.

Also another note, the graphic for the website has a faded logo behind the phrase "who will pwn it?" which says "Pocket Kingdom" in bold letter above, and below "Own the World."

[ajax34i]

Plugged the original text (removed all the spaces) into the applet right above, with the keyword pocketkingdom and clicked decode.  Then copied the text from the result and pasted it into the input field at the top again, with keyword owntheworld, and hit decode again.  Got:

begincongratzstopmaybeyouarenottehsuckafterallstop
ifyouthinkyouaretrulyleetorabsolutelygosusendanemailtoawinnerisme
atthewiudzkyeznpcpmafdrbdumzdbuqkhfzgawcnnzddflzelhgeacx
beoffkfjlqnscqcktsxdadfvreqmfubuarsknzzustndwglaj

Bottom half seems to be garbled, so maybe I made a slight mistake.  Or it's encoded again.  Likely, awinnerisme at thew0rlddotcom followed by more text.   Possibly the applet got screwed up by the presence of the 0.

Oh yeah I just noticed that the letters in the original message are grouped according to the length of the words in the deciphered message:

Begin congratz stop maybe
you are not teh suck after
all stop if you think you
are truly leet or absolutely
gosu send an email to
awinnerisme at thew0rld dot
com TF SRRUD KXOL OGLJT VELV

etc.  

Apparently he couldn't encode the 0 so he left it as 0.  Both WMRJ0JAA and EJXR0YSJ are probably thew0rld, and knowing the cypher AND the decrypted version should let us find the key(s).

Will play more with it.

Got it.  Deleted the 0's from the original message and plugged it again through the decoder applet twice, first time with pocketkingdom and second time with owntheworld:

begin congratz stop maybe you are not teh suck after all stop if you think you are truly leet or absolutely gosu send an email to awinnerisme at thewrld dot com to claim your prize stop only the first will get the loot stop in thewrld second place doesnt mean squat end

Then just add 0 back into wrld to get w0rld.

Go ahead and send the mail, let us know what you win.

[SurfD]

Also another note, the graphic for the website has a faded logo behind the phrase "who will pwn it?" which says "Pocket Kingdom" in bold letter above, and below "Own the World."

FUCK.  If this is even remotely what i think it is, then go for: Greatest Marketing Ploy Evar.

I recently read a blurb on IGN about an NGuage Game called Pocket Kingdom, Own The World.

In the "lore" of the game, a bunch of "leet haxors" had cheated their way to the top spot in the ladder rankings, and been banned, resulting in a freeforall, as people competed for the right to fill the vacume and claim the new slot as king of the hill.

This may very well be nothing more then a big marketing scheme gearing up for the release of the game.

[schild]

You mean like I l0ve Bees? Of course it is. Jesus did you think it was just some clever internet guy? I mean I didn't know it was pocket kingdom, but it was definately a marketing thing.

[Murgos]

If I had thought it was a marketing ploy I would have attacked it differently.  I would have assumed it was a code meant to be broken and then started with the easy peasy ciphers.

I never actually looked at the parent page because I thought it was an actual, you know, challenge.  You can crack a Vigenere cipher in about 10 minutes with MAPLE without having to even guess at the key.