Posts by Cameron G. Gould
It was solved! Was in fact a Quagmire III vigenere cipher. So without crib dragging, it was mathematically impossible to solve!
Everyone in office, still taking meetings via video call from our desks.
FINE, I’ll use Automator
Frustratingly simple feature I’d love to have when highlighting and right-clicking text:
- remove whitespace
- to uppercase
- to lowercase
- remove special characters
Yet all I get is the occasional bold, italicize, and underline.
I got a Ubuntu jumpscare at Wendy’s the other day
I’ve learned quite a few languages now, but man #golang is fun. Is it a “boring,” simple language? Sure. That’s what makes it fun! I can build really cool stuff really easily.
Right now I’m building a module for audio quality assurance for various audio files:
github.com/camggould/aqa
Hm. Binary nybbles with an abnormally high number of 7s, no 2s or 0s, across like 13k bits…
What could it be? #Cryptography #Cryptanalysis
Raspberry Pi is overpowered! Hosting discord bots for free is so awesome
9 is a divisor too but has the same alignment with 6 as 3 does, idk. And what the hell am I supposed to do with a charset of 512? Hello??
Listen my thought process here was that it was interesting how octal just reads a byte and converts the number to octal, same with decimal, same with hexadecimal, so like I NEEDED a bit count that wasn’t 8 and we have 1152 bits. My choices were 2, 3, 4, 6, or 8 and behold, 2 and 3 go into 6. DAMN.
Actually to backpedal—this in no way concludes it’s a stream cipher. It can still be a block cipher, I think.
Because OF COURSE it does, quarternary trigrams are LITERALLY just 6-gram binary, and that’s what we use to create the flipping base64 from the binary in the first place. No different than a hex conversion but with bigrams instead of tetragrams 🙃 so this must be a stream cipher!
One other thing I spent too much time on: interpreting decoded base64 binary in n-grams, converting to a number (quarternary in my case), and then using trigrams of that number to do a base64 index lookup… RESULTS IN THE ORIGINAL BASE64 STRING!! 🤦🏻♂️ #Cryptography
A cool encoding mechanic I found today (security through obscurity):
You can encode a message to base64 and then execute the following steps:
- reverse
- decode
- encode to hex
- reverse
- decode
- encode to base64
- …
Entropy stays fairly stable too! #Cryptography
It really is! I have learned a lot on classical cryptography, but only in its original form of usually standard alphabet use-cases.
Changing the character set to something like binary, hex, base64 and doing it that was is very interesting, still studying the effects.
The other factor perhaps is something ridiculous like a custom playfair on hexadecimal, requiring a base conversion to get there.
Actually… certainly something to try!
Recent experiments with our classical cipher masked as a base64 encoded string:
- XOR with provided key? Nope.
- input/output diff? Nope.
- Binary -> DNA sequence? Nada.
- Trifid? Perhaps, but perhaps… not!
- custom hill? … pending
Security through obscurity is tough. #Cryptography
Hey #ATProtocol enthusiasts. I’m shopping to get out of centralized platforms. I’ve found alternatives like PinkSky for Instagram and Bluescreen for TikTok. These platforms feel redundant—same feeds/content as BlueSky!
What am I missing?
Not even passing empty string?
This thing is tricky. I found some not-too-interesting patterns (so far) with binary trigrams. It’s 1,536 bits and has plenty of factors, with 2 and 3 being primes. I’m thinking perhaps DNA sequencing encoded in binary bigrams, maybe. First step must be XOR…
Ok new cipher. This one is particularly tricky. Base64, known classical technique used, but not sure which. Doesn’t decode to anything meaningful. Perhaps the message is encoded through shorter than 8 or 6 bit sequences?
#cryptography #cryptanalysis
This got solved tonight! I got as far as “WE HAVE WON THE GREAT BATTLE” and someone else nailed the solve.
Fun stuff!
Beautiful cover art
I cannot stand this culture. I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with it and it has put me in a place where I’ve started doubting my love for the field. I have to convince myself “I love the practice, hate *their* process.” I hit a sad place where something that used to give me energy now drains me!
It’s begging for QAAAAAAAA (testing)
Oh I didn’t see the alt text! Is it generated?
Agree I’ve seen it omitted as well, though without padding it’s more reflective of a base64 number system than base64-encoded bytes.
But that would be a ridiculously large number 😂
I think the correct evaluation is that it may not be base64 because there’s no padding at the end despite the length not being divisible by 4
I’ve got inklings of an idea to perhaps drive such innovation. Getting inspired by Bluesky a bit, honestly. Want to iron out the idea a little more and start building the future.