Crypto: Keys

So,… I think they may need to retire the Crypto Challenge: Keys. I was able to Google the key and it brought me to a website where I literally clicked ‘run’ and it spits out the answer. Flag worked and I got the points; however, let’s face it, that’s cheating and not really a valuable lesson.

Okay, now that’s off my chest. I REALLY WANT to understand what the heck this challenge was all about. I walked backward from the random sight I found to other web-areas of interest, and I understand the programming logic and what type of cipher it is overall. What I do not understand is how the heck I would have identified the initial crypto string to point me in the right direction. I was lost before I worked the Googlez on the Internet machine,… and I’m still lost now.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

You can search for ciphers that use that exact type of encoding - I was lucky as I found an interesting article by using another search engine than Google (could not replicate this this with Google).

An article about an app using that cipher had a sample string right at the top, and it reminded me of the strings in the text file.

@schlpr0k said:
So,… I think they may need to retire the Crypto Challenge: Keys. I was able to Google the key and it brought me to a website where I literally clicked ‘run’ and it spits out the answer. Flag worked and I got the points; however, let’s face it, that’s cheating and not really a valuable lesson.

Okay, now that’s off my chest. I REALLY WANT to understand what the heck this challenge was all about. I walked backward from the random sight I found to other web-areas of interest, and I understand the programming logic and what type of cipher it is overall. What I do not understand is how the heck I would have identified the initial crypto string to point me in the right direction. I was lost before I worked the Googlez on the Internet machine,… and I’m still lost now.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

Haha!! You are absolutely right. Someone solved it in repl.it and google hashed it so you can search for the key and find the python solution.
@sk8teroy should make it private.

Edit: I have no idea how they derived it was F****t cypher.

1st choice in hash regognition, cyberchef. Only told be that base64 valid. Ok then google for “base64 (few chosen words) python” (i’m a python guy and i want libraries handed to me and not mathimatical proof :P) Browser results and find an example with same looking hash on bottom of page 1.

This was a bit tricky since usually i would just google the hash and hope for google to make the connection to similar hashes on example, like it usually does. but on older challenges, I’ve found out that you cannot google any string found in the challenge without getting a straight answer / writeup. You could call it google-chi opposed to google-fu