Rccrypt Work Unit checkout

HEX	ASCII
30	0
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41	A
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4A	J
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4E	N
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50	P
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5A	Z
.	.
61	a
62	b
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67	g
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6D	m
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6F	o
70	p
71	q
72	r
73	s
74	t
75	u
76	v
77	w
78	x
79	y
7A	z

Please see Brian Enigma's impressive Card Catalog for a sorted, comprehensive listing of cards.

Main Article: The Thirteenth Labour

General

• article, 31-OCT-05 "Earth Leaderboard Dominated by UK" link

We're here to prove Kate Brewster wrong. We present to you, then, a coordinated Brute force. The community has proven itself quite capable of pushing out brute force efforts where needed before. Here's your chance to do a little homebrew anarchy.

Card 251, The Thirteenth Labour, (Showing the Jack of Hearts), can be seen in all it's glory here:

• http://perplexcitycardcatalog.com/view.php?item=251

The Text

It's a regular frog in the blender.

69 A9 3A FD C5 AD 43 8F 48 53 56 0F
1D 35 3A 8C 5C 44 A6 90 1B 76 46 C7
65 53 C8 A1 E4 B0 40 41 85 2B B7 81
59 E0 D2 39 35 A3 27 3B C3 AF 2E 2E
2F 3B 3B 0B 01 FE 67 51 FE 73 A8 E9
36 0A 93 85 55 2E 9A 4A AE C9 84 CF
18 F8 AB 4D B5 6D 45 07 4E 17 23 A5
7C F1 E8 BD A5 8A BD C8 FE FC DA 2B
6B 71 76 88 1F C0 D1 95 61 8D DB DC
D8 17 2E D7 1D D5 F7 AB AD AB 3E 52
2A 9A 9B BA 37 FE 80 FB 53 95 C9 1D
A2 22 AE 72 85 4A 43 1F 7C 2A BF 2A
79 3A 15 03 8D F2 5B 43 98 90 6D CC
A0 BB E2 A9 6A 52 D1 CB 2B 83 DE D8
BF EC 20 11 70 71 AA 22

Solving this by hand is, of course, not going to happen.

The Client

In the unfiction forums, Brian Enigma saves the day again. Here is his windows client: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=203466#203466

It works like this: Open a command prompt, and give a command which looks like this:

./rccrypt 00000000dead0000 65536

It will then try the key dead0000, dead0001, ...., deadbeee, deadbeef, all the way to deadffff. The key has to be 16 characters of hex.

There's an enhanced client from walther which only checks against text keys, and gives some wildcarding options. It needs the dll from the above link: http://forums.unfiction.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=204084#204084

Using the 2nd client will skip most possible keys, but it's much faster.

Work Units

Work units are 16777214 keys long. That's FFFFFF in hex. On my machine -- A 3Ghz with 500 Megs of RAM -- that should take about a half an hour. Therefore, to do the first work unit, I would run the following command:

rccrypt 0000000000000001 16777214

(there's minor zero offset differences which make this a little off, and i would actually start at 002, or make the first unit bigger. That's not the point.)

The next work unit is:

rccrypt 00000000000FFFFFF 16777214

The next work unit is:

rccrypt 00000000001FFFFFF 16777214

The next work unit is:

rccrypt 00000000002FFFFFF 16777214

See?

Hmm...

What follows is .... the gravity of the situation setting in.

<Scott> was just working out some numbers on the rccypt tool.

<Scott> 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 possible keys. assuming work units are 16777214 keys long (which should take a half an hour to work through), That breaks into 1,099,511,758,848 work units.

<Scott> Which works out to 62,757,520 years.

<Scott> suddenly, having people track theeir work units doesnt seem so important.

<Scott> I know people have been saying it would be very very very long and slow and take countably infinite hours to do. But seeing it in action ...

<Scott> man.

<Scott> Oh!! Good news!!

<Scott> I was off on my calculations!!

<Scott> I didn't account fFor leap Years!

<Scott> it would only take 62,714,565.3 years!!!!

<Scott> **whew** what a relief!

After sleeping on it

The realization is that the code can probably be simplified fFor a start, by limiting all possible output to include only letters and numbers makes things seem more reasonable. that's 26 upper case letters, 26 lowercase letters, and 10 digits, totalling 62. 62 possibilities in 8 places comes to 218,340,105,584,896 possible keys. divided by our given work unit size of , and you have 13,014,085 work units, which will take about 753 years to work through.

So that's a much more workable size. The trick is, however, eliminating all those holes in the hex-table from work units. Notice the table at right. between the numbers & uppercase, and uppercase & lowercase there's some gaps. That's a slightly more tricky matter. .. hmm..

Interestingly, if it's all done in lower case, it can be done in about 160 days. Another assumption we could make is that it's either ALL upper case, ALL lowercase, or "first capitalised". That's 160+160+160 days. Introduce numbers and it goes to pot again though.

PERPLEX CITY, SEASON ONE The search for the Receda Cube on Earth