{"id":1086,"date":"2016-08-04T19:29:42","date_gmt":"2016-08-05T02:29:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/?p=1086"},"modified":"2016-08-11T22:51:13","modified_gmt":"2016-08-12T05:51:13","slug":"1086","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/archives\/1086","title":{"rendered":"Uncertain Base64 – Overwatch Puzzle"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, there’s an Overwatch graphic of some base64 text with an unclear font… But what’s the point of writing something to solve a puzzle when you aren’t sure you have the right question?
\n\"Overwatch<\/a>
\nSo I made this little function which takes a base64-string and generates visually-similar versions:<\/p>\n

\r\n#!\/usr\/bin\/python\r\nimport itertools\r\nimport binascii\r\n\r\ndef B64Variants(val, confusions = None):\r\n    if confusions is None:\r\n        confusions = ["Il1","O0"] # Use defaults\r\n    val = val.translate(None, " \\n\\t") # Remove whitespace\r\n    sections = []        \r\n    for char in val:\r\n        confused = False\r\n        for group in confusions:\r\n            if char in group:\r\n                confused = True                \r\n                sections.append(list(group))\r\n                \r\n        if not confused:   \r\n            if (len(sections) > 0) and isinstance(sections[-1],str):\r\n                sections[-1] = sections[-1] + char\r\n            else:\r\n                sections.append(char)       \r\n    # Tidy up so we have a consistent list-of-lists\r\n    for i,v in enumerate(sections):\r\n        if isinstance(v,str):\r\n            sections[i] = [v]                \r\n    for varBits in apply(itertools.product, sections):\r\n        yield "".join(varBits)\r\n\r\nif __name__ == "__main__":\r\n    sample = binascii.b2a_base64("Hello, World!")\r\n    print "given", sample\r\n    for var in B64Variants(sample):\r\n        print "maybe", var    \r\n<\/pre>\n
Example output:<\/p>\n
\r\ngiven SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ==\r\n\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxklQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxk1Q==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8slFdvcmxkIQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8slFdvcmxklQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8slFdvcmxk1Q==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8s1FdvcmxkIQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8s1FdvcmxklQ==\r\nmaybe SGVsbG8s1Fdvcmxk1Q==\r\n<\/pre>\n
I think the next step is to try hooking this up to code which tries to decode the cipher-stream byte by byte, skipping to a new password (or a new Base64 source-string) when the decoded byte goes outside conventional ASCII. (I’m gambling that it’ll contain an ASCII message, if it doesn’t then it’s hard to know if you’ve successfully cracked it.)<\/p>\n
Finally, what happens if we apply this to one of the transcriptions people have made from the Overwatch Summer Games video? <\/p>\n
\r\nU2FsdGVkXI+vupppZksvRf5pq5g5XjFRIipRkwBOKIY96Qsv2Lm+3IcmzaAILwytX\/z66ZVWEQMccfIg+9m5UbuI+sit+A9cenDxxqkIaxbm4cMeh2oKhqIHhdaBKOi6XX2XDWpa6+P5o9MQw==\r\nU2FsdGVkXI+vupppZksvRf5pq5g5XjFRIipRkwBOKIY96Qsv2Lm+3IcmzaAILwytX\/z66ZVWEQMccfIg+9m5UbuI+sit+A9cenDxxqkIaxbm4cMeh2oKhqIHhdaBK0i6XX2XDWpa6+P5o9MQw==\r\nU2FsdGVkXI+vupppZksvRf5pq5g5XjFRIipRkwBOKIY96Qsv2Lm+3IcmzaAILwytX\/z66ZVWEQMccfIg+9m5UbuI+sit+A9cenDxxqkIaxbm4cMeh2oKhqlHhdaBKOi6XX2XDWpa6+P5o9MQw==\r\nU2FsdGVkXI+vupppZksvRf5pq5g5XjFRIipRkwBOKIY96Qsv2Lm+3IcmzaAILwytX\/z66ZVWEQMccfIg+9m5UbuI+sit+A9cenDxxqkIaxbm4cMeh2oKhqlHhdaBK0i6XX2XDWpa6+P5o9MQw==\r\nU2FsdGVkXI+vupppZksvRf5pq5g5XjFRIipRkwBOKIY96Qsv2Lm+3IcmzaAILwytX\/z66ZVWEQMccfIg+9m5UbuI+sit+A9cenDxxqkIaxbm4cMeh2oKhq1HhdaBKOi6XX2XDWpa6+P5o9MQw==\r\n..snip..\r\n<\/pre>\n
78,732 variations in total. Uh oh. I’m happy with the output, but whatever I use to go through these, it needs to be able to memoize or somehow reuse whatever progress it can from variant-to-variant, rather than starting over with each new string. <\/p>\n
P.S.<\/h3>\n
A more-realistic number would be 6,561<\/strong>, since we know that the first 1<\/code> is good because it’s part of the OpenSSL header, and because the letter O<\/code> is visibly wider than zero.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, there’s an Overwatch graphic of some base64 text with an unclear font… But what’s the point of writing something to solve a puzzle when you aren’t sure you have the right question? So I made this little function which takes a base64-string and generates visually-similar versions: Example output: I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,4],"tags":[30,26],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1086"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1086"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1086\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1118,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1086\/revisions\/1118"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}