My copy of the book finally showed up today. Some stuff:
First, what if the significance of the prime factors comic to the pixel block is that it's
3x3x23, i.e., the data should be considered as 23 items of 3x3 data. My first thought was 9-bit RGB, but although that gives a bunch of colours, I don't think it does anything useful. It then occurred to me that Marain, the language from Iain Banks' Culture novels, is written in a 3x3 grid (
essay on Marain by Banks). Unfortunately, while some of the symbols you get by plotting the contents of the block as 3x3 sections do occur in the Marain alphabet he provides, far from all do. I was able to get "??rv?rpyptch?tch??y??eh?????" or "?y?ee?th???h?z?ll?f?kt?h??p" depending on the order I plotted things in, neither of which are very helpful. I have no idea if this is likely to lead anywhere.
Edit: Also tried eight-bit bytes plus a parity bit, and nine-bit bytes including Hamming coded parity bits, but it doesn't seem to work.
skeptical scientist wrote:page 10112
Could this be referring to something other than the 10020 code? I don't like the redundancy at all, but I can't see what else it could apply to.
The brute force program in the post above provides nothing useful for me either. I'm checking others' work on the known keyparts. There have been a couple of different values for page 11002 posted, but it definitely gives me 735646B0.
Edit: Okay, all known keyparts checked. No discrepancies noted. For reference, my values are:
Brute force code still doesn't get any hits. Are we positive the code works? I assume this has been done, but can someone with more knowledge of OpenSSL than me double check by encoding a message with the known keyparts and some made up 6th part, then run the forcer on it and check we get the plaintext back?
Are we sure part 3 (from page 1111, the crypto conference) is correct, and it is just the numbers on the screen? That and assumed part 4 bother me, since neither are directly labelled like the other parts.
