Forum Discussion
Bronze III'm stucked in "A Christmas Catastrophe: Let It Snow".
I'm stucked in "A Christmas Catastrophe: Let It Snow".
I've tried a lot of things:
- Fill the <error> characters with the ones defines with only one space and repeated
- Try to discover the word holiday
- Try to find a pattern of the encryption to fill the non defined letters
Can somebody help me?
The last two characters of the string are the same "<ERROR:57><ERROR:57>"?
What sort of strings do we know about that end with the same character repeated two times? (where that character is not configured with any value currently in the broken code (I'm assuming you have a list of the characters that aren't working, as well as the lengths from the ERROR values?)) ;-)
6 Replies
- autom8on
Silver I
Genuinely my favourite ever lab! :-)
Don't want to give too much away - but from the start of my notes:
Found the following bash snippet online which will count the number of whitespace chars per line:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8683443/linux-counting-spaces-and-other-characters-in-file
while IFS='' read -r line
do
printf "%s\n" "$line" | sed 's/ /%/g' | grep -o '%' | wc -w
done < filename.000
I then started by creating a character map file - and encrypting/decrypting it to see what was working right and what wasn't (there's a mistake in the following screenshot if you look closely):
Hopefully when starting to play around, something recognisable might jump out at you!
I'll stop there for now - but give me a shout back if you're still stuck or not sure how to progress... ;-)
jcberlanThanks for your answer.
The point are this:
The snow map has 17 characters with the same assignation: ''
The decrypted message added to errors related with this faulty assignation is not comprehensive.
what I don't see is how to correct this errors:Assign bad assigned characters to the missing ones: ie 'a': ' ' * 21, and so...
Or is there any movement in the whole map?
in any case the result doesn't take me anyway (I wrote the number of characters of the faulty):
<ERROR:16>GF<ERROR:48><ERROR:11>Hkg<ERROR:16>G<ERROR:38>s<ERROR:65>WRheX<ERROR:67>gZn<ERROR:25>vb<ERROR:16>B<ERROR:25>bW1l<ERROR:11>nNpd<ERROR:18><ERROR:90>gTGFi<ERROR:11><ERROR:79>4g<ERROR:16>GF<ERROR:30>Z<ERROR:16>Bh<ERROR:44>HRv<ERROR:65><ERROR:30>Vu<ERROR:44>GY<ERROR:30>NDg0Yg<ERROR:57><ERROR:58>- autom8on
Hmm, that's interesting... when I do something similar, like:
I end up with the following output:
... if you look closely towards the end of that, something jumped out at me that doesn't for your string... are you sure your number of characters are correct?
Which gave me a definite starting point (in terms of what value to substitute), as well as a way of checking whether what I was doing was making sense or not. Then, as my notes say, "Just start swapping things until it makes more sense! ;-p"
- jcberlan
The difference is solved. I was using len() instead of char.count.
But even though, no idea how to start recoding:
Realocating faulty characters in non assigned doesn't workTaking 'H' as start of Holidays word and then assignating letters from there, neither. Bufff!
- autom8on
The last two characters of the string are the same "<ERROR:57><ERROR:57>"?
What sort of strings do we know about that end with the same character repeated two times? (where that character is not configured with any value currently in the broken code (I'm assuming you have a list of the characters that aren't working, as well as the lengths from the ERROR values?)) ;-)
- jcberlan
Finally, solved. With some patiente, assigning characters to faulty codes, step by step, and one and one, achieved! Thank you for your help.
