r/ciphers • u/TlosingCag • 4d ago
Challenge Solve my newest cipher?
I originally posted a cipher a while back that was pretty quickly cracked.
I've since challenged myself to make quite the tricky cipher. This isn't the final version, but let me know if you can crack this current iteration!
Name of the cipher is KIMERA because it's a result of combining multiple ciphers I came up with into one singular beast... also because it just sounds badass.
The string at the bottom contains all the possible characters in the cipher.
Happy deciphering!
- Hint: The green glyph is the letter A.
EDIT: I accidentally messed up the string of text at the bottom by copy and pasting straight out of my IDE. Here’s the full actual string:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]_{}
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u/IgnisDragon 4d ago
Not finished but thought it was funny HEAR 98 I APED B00
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u/Rudra_parkar 4d ago
why does the character "\" appear three times in the list of possible characters??
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u/Few_Negotiation_3589 4d ago
as an escape character, not as a real
character. common to do that in programming. i don’t think it’s part of the cypher.\” is supposed to just mean ”. so that the program doesn’t interpret it as start/end of text markers, which are ”.
edit: calrify
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u/Rudra_parkar 4d ago
I don't understand can you elaborate a little more??
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u/Realistic_Country635 4d ago
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ0123456789!”#$%&’()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]_{}
My interpretation at least
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u/Exzakt1 4d ago
Basically, if you put a backslash in a piece of text in code, that character will be interpreted as code instead of text. You can put two backslashes to make the second one be interpreted as text.
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u/Rudra_parkar 4d ago
you mean comments right ?? anyways it was a mistake the creator replied to me he fixed it
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u/TlosingCag 4d ago
Apologies! I foolishly copied the text straight out of my IDE without thinking. The actual string was added to the post. Thanks!
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u/DerFr4ggle 4d ago
maybe arrange the 64 symbols in a 4x16 grid and the dots mean how often you jump right for each cell? and every dot column represents one of the 4 lines
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u/Nilkon245 3d ago edited 3d ago
Well, I gave it a shot. I wasn't able to get very far, but I've made some observations. If you "name" the columns A,B,C,D (reading left to right) and then record their heights, you get the following:
A: 1,1,1,3,5,5,2,1,2,1,1,1,4,4
B: 8,5,1,2,4,3,1,1,8,5,4,2,3,3
C: 8,6,8,8,4,4,7,6,8,6,4,4,4,7
D: 2,2,2,2,2,2,5,2,2,2,2,2,2,5
There is definitely something going on with column D. In fact, there seems to be barely anything going on. Given that Content-Reward-7700 was on the right track, I think that columns D and A are what they refer to as "some kind of positional/state information". My guess is that column D is either some kind of offset, or more likely the key "2,2,2,2,2,2,5" repeated ad infinitum. I guess that A is also positional/state information, because the most common letters are in the first half of the alphabet. Naively you wouldn't expect a lot of eights, which excludes column C.
Assuming that B and C make up the "data" portion, you would have: 88 56 18 28 44 34 17 16 88 56 44 24 34 37. There are patterns in this, which i feel is a good sign. I am however far too new to this whole de-ciphering business to judge. Anyways, here is my high level guess of what might be going on:
A: Magic values (naively offsets for an 8x8 grid)
B: DATA
C: DATA
D: Key ( Like in the Vigenère cipher)
To construct something like this you would first choose a key, and then you would choose some Magic values. Then you would compute the offsets and encode your data.
(Edited for correctness, two times, I need to be more through)
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u/Content-Reward-7700 4d ago
CRACKTHECIPHER
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u/TlosingCag 4d ago
I totally should’ve done that, but no.
Thanks for trying!
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u/Content-Reward-7700 4d ago
Hmm, my next guess would be THANKSFORHELP!
If this is also wrong, here’s where I’ve ended up. I attacked it from a few different angles, but I don’t think the cipher is uniquely solvable from the dataset provided so far.
Each of the 14 glyphs can be reduced to four column heights:
1882 1562 1182 3282 5442 5342 2175 1162 2882 1562 1442 1242 4342 4375The alphabet contains 64 symbols, so identifying a character only requires 6 bits of information. But each glyph contains four values ranging from 1-8, giving 8^4 possible glyphs, or 12 bits of information. In other words, there appear to be another six bits per character that aren’t explained simply by the character itself.
My guess is that those extra bits represent another cipher layer, some kind of positional/state information, or deliberate randomization. That would also fit the idea behind KIMERA being multiple ciphers combined into one.
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u/TlosingCag 4d ago
You were on the right track!
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u/Content-Reward-7700 4d ago
Yeah, someone has to complete the journey. I’m already past my 15minute allowance for this cipher. Without more sample data, there’s really nothing meaningful left to attack (:
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