Too hard? | Hacker News Reader

Too hard?

izhack.com

7 pointskator26 comments

Working on a number of "gateway" challenges for a client.

Not sure if this is too hard with zero hints.

It's so hard to measure when you're the one who created the puzzle. I came up with a couple solutions but again how do you separate the personal bias of being the puzzle maker?

A md5sum of the first thing you create and then use along with 'step 2' would be a nice way to see if you're on the right track. Otherwise... it's hard to say exactly where things are going wrong.

A couple hints:

1) You most likely won't solve it in a browser

2) The actual text is NOT encrypted

3) It will take 4 to 5 connections together to solve the problem

Updated to hopefully make it a bit clearer.

Also there is an alternate challenge at izhack.com port 12346 but you can't read it in a browser. :)

... just because you get a RSA thing (ahem) out of it doesn't mean it'll work with your "Step 2". Those things aren't armored, so it's possible to corrupt it and have no luck getting anywhere.

Or did you intend for it to be straight-up frustrating?

No it's designed as a challenge not designed to be frustrating. Think of reasons you think you see cipher text in it..

And there is nothing 'armored' about this thing, it's so plainly in your face I'm stunned nobody had figured it out yet.

Kator, have you read Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid?

If you are trying to say I created a puzzle only I can solve you would be wrong. I have someone who solved it but they're into protocol analysis and crypto.

No, I think it's solvable and even easy (depending on definition). Beforing you gave the tips I saw that "scrambled" trimmed the response always at the same byte length. Then I saw everytime it returned something different. Then, doing a "for i in $(seq 0 50); do curl izhack.com:12345 | head -7 | tail -1 | cut -c 1-250; done; I could see the pattern.

Doing the same for the other lines, replacing head -7 with head -8, head -9, etc I grabbed the repetition columns for all 5 lines. Each line had different columns repeated.

Creating a 5x300 grid and marking the cells where repetition occurs you see there's a symmetry. The repeats 5 times, where at column 58 every line repeats and it marks the repetition.

This is where I left, I still don't know the meaning of the last line. When I first run, coincidentally the server returned "sAlt" :-)

I was only asking if you knew the book because you seem to like puzzles and me too. As I liked the book I thought you might like and was trying to start a conversation.

Sorry!

Ah, you need a 300-column terminal to avoid line breaks :-)

I have a 254 column terminal :-)

That said you will want to use code to analyze it.. You're very close..

Oh you are soooo close.. And I'm not offended at all.

I like puzzles but I like this have some sort of relationship to real life if possible.. :)

Look, I got the thing extracted, or so I think. It's just not working. Go look at your syslogs and you should see the inbound failures.

Okay, tell me this. Is this the right md5sum?

775361fdc57dca8689d99f2b390bf258 out

That's including the full output from your not-really-HTTP server on 12345, specifically version "Jan 7 2013 16:37:48".

If are attempting it please post your thoughts here.

I will give more hints if nobody pops it.

rsa-155

The instructions are not encrypted they are interspersed at repeatable intervals.

The pattern has a width of 57 columns. The decoded text looks like the beginning of a private key to me.

If you decode it you will know. :)

Yes, I liked the challenge I'll take another shot tonight.

If you decoded it then you should have the next steps??

Is figuring out a passphrase part of the step 2, or did I miss something ?

http://xkcd.com/356/

Funny but this is a real challenge and it's solvable.

A hint would be nice.

See above for hits, it can be solved without any knowledge of the internal process used to display the free text.

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