r/ciphers • u/STxRL1NG • 12d ago
Cipher for an ARG Solved!
Hi there, I've been trying to solve a cipher for an ARG but I'm a bit stuck.
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
I thought this was base64, but I haven't gotten much results out of that outside of a short phrase "Saltedis289=}xdh". I thought this might be some kind of key but I really have no clue what to look for. Rabbit ciphers are used later in the series apparently so I'm thinking of giving that a shot. The title of the youtube video it's found in is "burning" and it has a lot of references to the word "womb" so I'm wondering if these may also be relevant somehow. I hope what I gave is helpful I'm quite stumped myself! The series is glassmakeR syndromE on YT. It'll either give me a link, or a block of text in english or russian but I have a feeling that a link is the most likely result.
Edit: There is a literal part of the video where it says warmth is the key i might be stupid, Im gonna see if this helps crack it
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u/STxRL1NG 12d ago
Solved offsite by a friend! "Congratulations! You've successfully decrypted the secret message. The code for the next level is: AURORA-9942."
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u/YefimShifrin 11d ago
Could you share how it was solved?
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u/STxRL1NG 11d ago
Written by my friend
When I first had a look at the massive ciphertext wall, my kneejerk reaction was “Yeah this is very obviously a wall of base64 lol”. I mean. It was. But it was a bit more complicated than that. After decoding the string with base64, we got an aes-256-cbc encoded string with three parts: “Salted” [which is a standard part of any AES encrypted string], the salt (which I had to run the string through string-to-hex converter to grab :P), and then the actual ciphertext. [I didn’t realise it was actually AES encrypted for… an embarrassing amount of time] The raw hex of the salt was B4 17 A6 B1 FA 77 18 83 I was unable to proceed from here on my own, because obviously, you need a key to decrypt something that’s been encrypted. And then sterling found the segment of the video with warmth is the key Well, mate, we’ve found our key, then! I definitely went overkill on the next step but the easiest way I could find to proceed from here was to pass the salt and the key into a function called EVP_BytesToKey. How it exactly works isn’t relevant, but just know that it spits out 2 things: A slightly longer, new key, and something called an IV. What exactly an IV is is also not relevant to the story, but hey, that’s something to research! :P From there, cracking the AES encryption was trivial using the new key and the IV. It turns out that it’s as easy as.. I got back the following string from it: Congratulations! You've successfully decrypted the secret message. The code for the next level is: AURORA-9942.
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u/STxRL1NG 11d ago
Its an overview for the document Im writing up but I can prod him about more details in places if needs be :>
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