I’ll post my code too then. https://pastebin.com/MTJRMn9m
You can execute it here: https://sandbox.onlinephpfunctions.com/
(keys and iv are case sensitive, that worries me a bit)
faed has found that we can connect to terminal.blackmesasource.com (as well as gman.blackmesasource.com and bmrf.us, same IP) with SSH. Not sure how the login HALOS and password BENALOHPAILLIER will provide us access though.
The bytes divisible by three rule doesn’t apply to black and white images…
It doesn’t even apply to grayscale images.
TL;DR: The hex is probably not an image, as demonstrated by faed, Flafla2, etc.
I’d second that. It’ll be a better idea to focus on decrypting the hex using a modern block cipher rather than treating it as an image. Even with the 4-byte RGBA pixel format the result is garbage (well…you might consider it as some form of art).
The hex is likely not encoded using some simple substitution cipher or things similar to Ascii85. What’s unusual about this hex is that its entropy is higher (i.e. more random) than that of a typical English text and all other codes we’ve deciphered so far in this entire ARG. This implies that the hex can be a multimedia data, or a ciphertext produced by ciphers with good diffusion property (which is characteristic of modern ciphers). We can also rule out all classical ciphers, since most (all?) of them work only with uppercase alphabets.
Naturally, things become nastier when we got into modern encryption. For instance there’re several different modes of operation for block ciphers, some of which require an additional “Initialisation Vector” (IV). And the possible “password” we got (“BENALOHPAILLIER”) doesn’t have 128 bits (a typical key size), which adds another layer of uncertainty. Keep in mind that in a typical crypto implementation the actual key used for encryption is not the user’s password itself; instead, the actual key is generated from the password using some hash function, so that the length of the generated key exactly fits the key size of the block cipher in question. This is to avoid problems like the password length being too long or too short. However I’d think that Storm isn’t going to complicate matters to this extent. Besides, we aren’t even sure whether all the characters in the password should be uppercase, as pointless noted.
Main point: there’re more nasty bits (literally) than ever for this code.
There’re quite a few more block ciphers with 64-bit block size. Think CAST-128, IDEA, or some other obscure ciphers you can find in Wikipedia. We might want to try all of them, so having programming skills would be a big plus. You won’t want to try things like RSA or any other public key ciphers as you’d need the recipient’s private key to decrypt it, and the private key (which is typically a large number) isn’t supposed to be exposed or shared (not even with the sender).
The decrypted data is probably an English text. It’s less likely an image (but not impossible) since its size would be too small to convey useful information.
Useless post maybe. Just my 2 cents.
Seriously though, is programming actually needed to have fun with this ARG? I think we should backtrack a little before we went too far…
Good points. As for the programming thing, I had an hour free, so I decided to have a go at the image theory. I didn’t really expect it to work (this is probably the final code, as hinted in the IRC message that created it) anyway, so no big deal.
Noticed that the new big code has 3914 in it, wich was code C. Could this mean the last code is a VIC-cipher?
Not possible, since encoded VIC message is just numbers. Unless it’s double encoded or something, which I doubt.
The VIC system could theoretically be done with hexadecimal - “Victor would like this extension”.
I don’t think that’s likely though, because hexadecimal VIC would be probably easier to crack.
Extension was a reference to SECOM cipher. Also, hexadecimal VIC isn’t documented and I doubt he would make a totally new cipher, because it would be very hard to break it.
I really, really hope you mistyped those links.
What? Is this some kind of viral marketing?
Ignore.
It was found and decoded a month ago. Whether it carries any deeper meaning related to the current code is unknown.
Dammit. I even tried searching first. Oh well, I tried.
Wait, what? What just happened here?
unhingedmouse0 got unhinged from the face of the earth and can’t update the OP, so now people are confused about code D because it still shows as not decrypted on the first post of this thread
…Sorta.
I’ll try to update the OP shortly. I thought people had just switched to using the wiki. I clearly have a lot to catch up on though.
I updated the Wiki to make it obvious where our attention currently resides.
https://thepizzaisalie.wikia.com/wiki/The_Pizza_Code_Mystery_ARG_Wiki
It is definitely in the best interest of everyone to read the wiki, it has been updated and formatted for easy reading.
I need an opinion: Do you think we should put our little pizza puzzle here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternate_reality_games?