Friday, 10 May 2013

cipher - Lolcat Steganography: Find the message hidden within the transport medium of humorous feline photography


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  • The Bad Guys (curse them!) have begun communicating in lolcats, to enable their Internet communications to take place unnoticed.




  • This is a job for the NSA/GCHQ crack team of cryptanalysts.





  • Unfortunately they're a bit busy today, so you'll have to do it.




  • A secret message is concealed in the lolcatstream above.




  • It's a pencil-and-paper cipher. You do not need a computer to decipher it.





  • All the information you need is above the horizontal line. These instructions (everything below the horizontal line) do not contain hidden information.




  • From HUMINT assets, you have received the Bad Guys' code book. You know for certain that the message above consists entirely of one of the following code words:


    YODA (meaning "Your cover has been blown!")


    LUKE (meaning "Get me Tom Cruise's autograph!")


    LEIA (meaning "Explode the enormous bomb on Tuesday!")


    FISHCAKE (meaning "Send more food!)


    DURANCE (meaning "Give yourself up to the police!")





  • Summary (just for clarity). There is a hidden message in the lolcats above. It consists of one of this set of words: YODA, LUKE, LEIA, FISHCAKE, DURANCE. Your task is to discover which of those words the message consists of. Please explain your answer.




It's been a few days and nobody's cracked it, so here's a clue (if you need it):



Cats like bacon.




Answer



Well, I finally figured it out (thanks to the hint, of course).



The hint is "Cats like bacon", which means that



the message is encoded with a Baconian cipher.



In this case, we need to figure out



the binary distinction in the images upon which the encoding was based.



The characteristic used to encode the message is




the color of the cats: a fully-white cat is B, others are A.



So the encoded message is:



ABABA BAABB ABAAB AABAA



Which translates to



L U K E




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