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Unscrambling text for an assignment

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(@forveux)
Posts: 20
Eminent Member
Topic starter
 

Hello FF,

A part of my final assessment in my uni course is unscrambling text. I've gotten to a certain point and I've hit a wall.

I'll be explaining what I've tried so far - if you could point in a direction or two I should take, I'd appreciate it! I may also get my juices re-flowing by explaining my thought process in writing.

After my explanation, I'll list the text.

Tools I've searched for - text unscramblers I feel this is a fools errand as there are numbers in the text, as well as special characters

I mentioned to my lecturer I've found a lot of character pairs that exist in the text. He stated that I'm doing lexical analysis - upon wikipedia'ing it, I understand that you feed a stream of characters into a tool like lex, and using a program like c, you tokenize particular characters, like attributing an integer or string to a global variable.

My hypothesis is that each pair is a letter of the alphabet. I'm trying to find 26 pairs.

So now I'm up to the stage of tokenizing. I've sifted through the text and so far have come up with the following conclusions (shown after the stegtext)

Thank you in advance for any suggestions you can provide

Possibilities plain text character is two cipher characters

**IVE PLACED THE TEXT DOCUMENT IN THE SECOND PAGE*******

Not sure if I should've just edited this post to include the .rar link…

1. FB is always together
2. ZF at first ~z seemed like a likely pair. Then I saw a stegstring that, if it included the ~, the stegstring would be an odd number. I shifted one character to the right when I re-searched ~Z, and saw
~ZFo~ a few times. I then searched ZF, which also led me onto note down o~. So I got two pairs from this
new 2. O~
3. NB
4. Fk
5. {~
6. JF
7. GE
8. b6
9. 6z
10. zF
11. cw
12. BF
13. j7
14. j6
15. S~
16. ZB
17. ZF - 87 - could be vowel. there is an instance where they exist side by side. words where 'i'. i thought it was this then i saw a single letter between O~ and ZF. So this has to be FZ.
new 17. FZ - 25
18. ZG - 12
19. 22 - 12
20. 2j - 12
21. r^ - 5

To help out, I've collated entire strings that appear in non random patterns

~Jj22zbk occurs SEVEN TIMES.

JZ22ZBG~ twice (too many characters in sequence to be random, even though it appears only twice)

jbzFBb6z>^Zs~ occurs three times

GË×ËÖ occurs twice

ËÖ^..?CBjGF"ZRZ>jnZ{FB6 occurs twice

~Jj22zbkO~ZJzbkO~B7~fZNk occurs twice

FB6cB"ZR[B occurs twice

ZFcw occurs three times (come, came, done, have)

j6K is four times (for, has, him, her, did, the?)

jb zF Bb 6z >^ occurs NINE TIMES

~Z3~rBFrj occurs twice

There are no 'a's. The a could be a number. It could be 2 or 6.
7, 2, 3 and 6 are the only numbers that appear
2 may equal = B, L
THERE ARE NO d, h, l, m, p, q, t, u, x,
e appears once
i appears once
y appears once

3210 characters, no spaces. This would be an issue if there were odd characters. this enforces the theory that one plain character = two cipher characters

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 
Posted : 14/05/2014 8:42 am
jhup
 jhup
(@jhup)
Posts: 1442
Noble Member
 

Can you point the a complete file, as the high characters cannot be viewed/used.

What is class is this for?

What is the container of the item? Is it a log, plain written message, word document, a compressed file, etc?

What is the context of the class? Background in recent encryptions, story around the generation and hints the instructor gave. Or, was it "here is a file, decrypt"?

 
Posted : 15/05/2014 12:32 am
(@forveux)
Posts: 20
Eminent Member
Topic starter
 

Its for Forensic computing

Its a log - was just sent in a text file. All the text sites I'm uploading to are stripping bits of it out but I think I've found one site

http//m.uploadedit.com/b034/1400134635918.txt

No clues, except 'steganography'

And yes - 'heres a file, decrypt'

Thank you for your reply

 
Posted : 15/05/2014 11:18 am
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
Posts: 5133
Illustrious Member
 

Its for Forensic computing

Its a log - was just sent in a text file. All the text sites I'm uploading to are stripping bits of it out but I think I've found one site

Well, IMHO first thing it is NOT a "text file" if we define a text file as something that contains only a-z, A-Z, 0-9, all accented characters and punctuation signs, besides of course non-printable characters like TAB or CR+LF.
The sheer moment you "transform" (or encrypt or obfuscate or hash or encode) some text, and you use any character outside the above boundaries, it is not anymore a text file, but rather a "binary" one.
Admittedly a binary encoding of a text file, but not a text file.
As such, opening and saving it (without changing anything) even in the most simple "Notepad" program may (and will) change it.
What you should do is to get the original, compress it into a .zip (or similar) archive and upload the archive.
Then if you want to "peek" at the original file you need to use a hex viewer/editor.

jaclaz

 
Posted : 15/05/2014 1:18 pm
(@forveux)
Posts: 20
Eminent Member
Topic starter
 

Greatly appreciated jaclaz, I'm going to try that after I post the following clues in the assignment deliverable description

You can gain full marks by the following Scrambled bits are restored to the original text. The tool used to decode the text is mentioned and the justification to use the tool is also provided. The process to restore the scrambled bits is clearly described with screenshots of all steps provided.

So it is a tool I require. I'm going to see if it's this hex editor you speak of (trying HxD hex editor)

Also, thank you for hitting me up in regards to my lax use of terminology!

 
Posted : 15/05/2014 7:11 pm
(@forveux)
Posts: 20
Eminent Member
Topic starter
 

Ok I zipped the text file and viewed the .zip file with the hex editor I described

I got the following output

http//imgur.com/94bNBVn

I googled 'tool for unscrambling a binary file' . Now textmechanic I've used before (top hit) and its a simple scrambler. The next hit was a script to unscramble binary (FXT) files into a readable format.

I'm going to keep trying keywords into my world wide google machine and checking out particular tools

 
Posted : 15/05/2014 7:51 pm
jaclaz
(@jaclaz)
Posts: 5133
Illustrious Member
 

Ok I zipped the text file and viewed the .zip file with the hex editor I described

NO.
I was evidently not clear enough.

Compressing the file into an archive is a way to "package it" in a form that most free hosting sites will accept, i.e. is the correct way (if you want to share it with the foruim members, so that they can have a look at it), pasting the contents of the file is "wrong".

As well it is "wrong" to view the "original" file in anything else but a proper tool, which in this case is NOT a text viewer/editor, but rather a hex view/editor.

It makes no sense to view the archive in a hex viewer, it makes sense to view the original file in it.

jaclaz

 
Posted : 16/05/2014 12:22 pm
jhup
 jhup
(@jhup)
Posts: 1442
Noble Member
 

Imagine that the file is a giant sponge you just collected off the beach of Kauaʻi. You want to mail it to your grandmother's sister's neighbor's daughter, because she made some awesome oatmeal cookies for your trip.

Without squeezing it, you cannot mail it. It is giant. So, you have to squeeze it into a box half of the original size.

But, once it is squeezed into the box, could your grandmother's sister's neighbor's daughter use it? Worse. you didn't send the box, you just sent a picture of the box. Can she use the picture? Not unless she is going to rub the picture of the box on herself. That is what you sent us a picture of the box. That's like telling your prospective wife, here is the picture of a ring I may get you in the future.

What you need to send us is the actual box (the ZIP file), and we can open the box (the ZIP file), and out pops the sponge (the original file), restored to its glorious original giant shape.

Note that if you collected sponge off the beach of KauaÊ»i you maybe in violation of several international, national and state laws. We can also not believe that a grown man accepts cookies from strange women. I mean what were you thinking when you took the cookies?!? And, why are you sending pictures of boxes to women? What is wrong with you? Do you have no shame? I mean I heard strange things, but this clearly takes the sponge…

mrgreen

 
Posted : 23/05/2014 12:55 am
(@forveux)
Posts: 20
Eminent Member
Topic starter
 

I actually laughed out loud! Thanks so much for this, and I admit that I GROSSLY misinterpreted the instructions

http//www.megafileupload.com/en/file/533462/task-2-rar.html

This is the file

I've tried a hex viewer on it - it shows the same goobledegook

Here it is

P.S. should I have edited my original post with this link? Instead of putting it here?

 
Posted : 23/05/2014 10:07 am
jhup
 jhup
(@jhup)
Posts: 1442
Noble Member
 

Take a look at byte-wise histogram.

Here are some clues -
* not all 256 byte-space is used
* only 76 characters are used
* of the 76, only 26 are above 1% usage
* all characters but one in the top 26 are printable
* looking at the busy area of the histogram, there is a two-byte gap, then two byte count.

 
Posted : 24/05/2014 12:46 am
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