Hyperpro cracking, by sNv, June 1999


Thanks for the "hyperprotections" challenge. You did a wonderful and clever job of making it just difficult enough to appreciate the success and yet so easy that one doesn't toil for many hours or days. I appreciate the balance!

Due to the simplicity and your generosity, I do not feel others could learn from my success, but I will mention how I "solved" it. Since I am not well versed in Russian literature or arts (if it is Russian), I resigned myself to the code.

Basically, I figured the phrase was in English (from the rest of your website), and using a dictionary I created from M$Word a while back, I created a list of two-letter English words (thanks for the clue). I used your decode() function and a simple "brute force" of the first 4 letters of the key (26^4 combos), to produce a list of about 100 possible combos which resulted in the first two two-letter phrases of the cipher text. Of these 100 or so phrases, only about a dozen "made sense" ("go to", "it is", etc...) The others were just bad English ("so ma", "hi pa", etc).

When I tried the key, "baba" ("go to"), I saw the following: "Go to kyr11jav.htp......Sae you tkete!"

As you can see, you generosity in using a key with repeating characters helped "fill in the blanks" even more! Anyway, it was clear to me that the last portion should read, "See you there!", so I worked on reversing the word "there" manually from the ciphertext. In a matter of minutes, I had the complete key: "babayaga".

It kinda has a ring to it!

Thanks again,

sNw

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