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Tengri 137: How my readers solved the second challenge within a few days

Von / 18. März 2017 / 8 Kommentare / Seite 2 von 2 / Auf einer Seite lesen
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If the letter E is taken as word divider, a possible decryption of the beginning is:

abccad fbgh ijklm lndj cnd opcd bm kqdj
LITTLE MIND KNOWS WHEN THE GATE IS OPEN

Blog reader Alex later remarked that BIRD fits better than MIND. LITTLE BIRD may refer to Twitter. The end reads like this:

djhedjhedjh
END END END

Replacing A by zero and x by one in the AAxxAA part, Norbert received the following byte sequence: 36 36 36 36 36 36 6d 37 78 36 78 35 72 65 67 63 2e 6f 6e 69 6f 6e. Converted to ASCII character this means:

666666m7x6x5regc.onion

This is obviously an address in the TOR network. Blog reader Renederberserker tried to open it but it didn’t work. Probably, we need to “know when the gate is open”, as the message found by Norbert implies. The time when the gate is open might be announced on Twitter (“little bird knows”). It is well possible that the last page of the book, which is still unsolved, gives additional clues.

 

What does “regc” mean?

Blog reader Alex made another interesting discovery. The PGP-signed message linked in the most recent Tengri (137) tweet lists the following numbers: 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, 126. These are the magic numbers in nuclear physics. Only 126 is missing. However, if we interpret the string “666666m7x6x5” as “666666 modulo 7 × 6 × 5” we get 126.

I have to admit that I am absolutely overwhelmed by the many discoveries my readers have made. This is codebreaking as its best. Many thanks to Norbert, nimrodx0, Alex, and Klaus for this great work.

I wonder what will happen next. Will we find a way to open the TOR address “666666m7x6x5regc.onion”? Will there be additional tweets? Can we decipher the last page of the book? And, finally, what does “regc” mean?


Further reading: Tony Gaffney’s starlight steganogram

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Kommentare (8)

  1. #1 Arminius
    18. März 2017

    “regc” probably means nothing. It may just be an artifact due to the limited computing power when brute-forcing a Tor address.

  2. #2 Alex
    18. März 2017

    @Arminius brute-forcing a 12 char onion address (666666m7x6x5) takes also with a personal computer 1800 years. With a super computer maybe 300 to 500 years? If she can do this easily, why not a complete onion address with 16 chars?

    The tool GARLIC shows you how it works.

    Read here: https://tengri137.wikia.com/wiki/Twitter_message_2017#The_ONION_Address.21.21.21

  3. #3 Thomas
    18. März 2017

    regc = (storing) register c? (e.g.: https://www.google.com/patents/EP0046963B1?cl=en). Whatever the purpose of such a register in the modulo operation may be.

  4. #4 Arminius
    18. März 2017

    @Alex It’s a technique that show magicians use: They make you think an outcome was determined beforehand when they actually have a plan for different outcomes. It’s more plausible that only parts of the sequence were fixed and the rest was given a meaning after the fact. E.g., the challenge authors were looking for “interesting” sequences starting with 666666… and then created a story around the random rest. I understand that the alien superpower hypothesis is more intriguing, but it’s really just a trick.

    Also it’s unclear to me how according to the wiki a personal computer (“1800 years”) is supposed to be only 6 times slower than a “super computer” (“300 years”) for a task that can be easily parallelized. It absolutely makes sense to look for a meaning in all parts of the puzzle – but the all-caps this-is-not-human hysteria in the wiki won’t help the case.

    Maybe aliens are using the sequences to test how superstitious and susceptible to seeing patterns in random data humans are – and we have failed. 🙂

  5. #5 Alex
    18. März 2017

    @Arminius this sounds plausible. More a magician then a mathematician. I think, i now yet what the author means with reformating the brain. If you read the first pages (from page 1 to 17) you can understand what i mean.

  6. #6 Norbert
    18. März 2017

    abo

  7. #7 Klaus Schmeh
    18. März 2017

    Bart Wenmeckers via Facebook:
    Very impressive.
    Once audio is involved the options for modulation and encoding are huge

  8. #8 Anonymous
    4. April 2017

    @Alex, https://github.com/lachesis/scallion