The first part saying ‘Salted__’ only makes sense if the rest of it is encrypted. The data is definitely not a substitution cipher because of the amount of entropy.
Well, I’m out of ideas. Maybe we can wait for Xen, or pray to the holy god Stormseeker for guidance.
Considering how long we’ve been stuck on this, he will probably send us some other kind of clue, as ambiguous as it may be, whenever development allots him some downtime.
EDIT: Although, to be entirely honest, we’ve gotten a lot of clues handed to us on this one, and it’ll probably just take one solid breakthrough for the rest to make sense.
Actually, it can be a substitution cipher, provided that the key is a one-time pad or a keystream with a high enough entropy. One idea I’ve been considering is whether it could be a simple XOR cipher, where the key is based on some kind of pattern, for instance, a byte sequence derived from the digits of an irrational or trancendental number, like the number Pi.
I did a quick experiment: I took 3008 bits from the binary digits of Pi from this page and converted them to bytes. The entropy turned out to be 0.9294 (7.4352 bits per byte).
On a different note, I searched the Ubuntu package archive for anything related to encryption, and found a tool called mcrypt. From the looks of it, it can work with “bare” encrypted files and supports several cipher algorithms, cipher modes and key modes. This shows that there are other tools out there other than OpenSSL that could have been used to produce the code.
The room numbers in the second location clue were X01 and X02, weren’t they? The latter kind of looks like XOR, but didn’t we get that clue way before getting to the stage of the ARG we are now? Could be coincidence, but there it is.
I went and looked through our old clues. Does anyone remember if this image was useful for anything?
And this one as well…
maybe there simpely isnt any arg, and we are just rying to find soemthing that does not exists
Faed, if I am not mistaken, was that first image, when decoded, said something along the lines of that Daisy song that HAL 9000 sang?
I did a search. The first image is mentioned here and here.
The second image is mentioned here. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall someone saying that the same screen was also in the original HL. Another thing, while googling the text on that screen, I found this screenshot:
The monitor screen on the bottom left got my attention. It appears to be a crash dump. At the bottom of the screen there’s something that looks like a hex dump, and what’s interesting about it is that each line has exactly 24 bytes of data, which is exactly the number of bytes needed for a three-key Triple DES encryption key. Can we find a better image of that screen where it’s possible to make out the hex digits? This is probably just a coincidence, but nevertheless…
I checked back on some things too, and found this:
The jets on the landing strip are crossed out the same way as the pizza on the picture on the Tempus page. Could this be a reference to the HAFB?
EDIT:
Someone had a list of textures going at one point, and you can find them in your BM folder if you have the appropriate programs to view them.
I found the original texture file - materials\lab\labscreen1.vtf. Unfortunately, the resolution is too low. I couldn’t make anything out with any level of certainty, so I guess it’s a dead end.
Yeah, if it was meant to be used it would probably be easier to see, or at least have a secondary image or texture file with a higher resolution.
I haven’t been following this ARG for a long time. Could somebody tell me the basics of what’s going on right now?
The current status is that after 10 months, 26 days, the current gateway puzzle–which has proven notoriously difficult–remains unsolved.
Right now, some of us who are still working on this are reviewing old ideas, brainstorming new ideas and going over old clues looking for anything that might have been missed.
From stormseeker’s Steam profile:
Since everyone else seems to be trying to decode the gateway using cyphers, I decided to try for a more rudimentary approach; Converting it from hex into a string.
…Well. I was hoping it was just a really simple solution we overlooked. Ah well, worth a shot.
did you try different string encodings? UTF-8, UTF16, UNICODE, Others
No, just a web-based ASCII converter. Honestly, I’m completely out of my depth when it comes to solving ARGs like this, I just love watching them unfold, and, well, we haven’t had a new step in a while.
So is there anything going on here that I, as an individual with no real knowledge of cryptography, can hope to contribute?
Just wondering what has been figured out… I mean what is 100% known in the ARG right now?