Puzzle hint verbage unclear - unsure how to decode/decrypt message - encryption

I'm working on solving a puzzle and I ran into a phrase (see in bold below) that seems to be more puzzling than the puzzle itself so far. Here's what the puzzle says:
The password is [64bit hex code here]. Use it to decode the message below.
[Hex string goes here].
(HINT: Text is in hex; Cross the OR with the pass.)
Really puzzled as to what "Cross the OR with the pass." means in English as far decoding is concerned.
I'm happy to share actual hex string and password in direct message if desired.
Any help appreciated!

I solved it, conversely, with XOR by using the short HEX as input and long HEX string as key and it revealed the hidden message! Thanks all, and Maarten, for your comments!

Related

Why does contents of ^FN1 in ZPL not show all content when used in ^BQ command with ^FD?

I am looking for some direction here, as I seem to be missing something. I have the following ZPL that is loaded into a ZD620:
^XA
^LH0,0^LRN^FT100,50,0^A0N,30,30^FN1^FDCORELIMS.BARCODE^FS
^FO471,27^BQN,1,3^FDQA,^FN1^FS
^FT381,188^A0N,50,68^FD^FN1^FS
^XZ
I use an off-the-shelf software that turns CORELIMS.BARCODE into the entity's barcode value to be encoded. That works fine. What is not happening, when the Generated QR Code is scanned, the output is always missing the first 3 characters. What should show up is something like: 5BX10, what I get is: 10.
During my troubleshooting I used the following code and I receive the full string:
^XA
^LH0,0^LRN^FT100,50,0^A0N,30,30^FN1^FDCORELIMS.BARCODE^FS
^FO471,27^BQN,1,3^FDQA,5BX10^FS
^FT381,188^A0N,50,68^FD^FN1^FS
^XZ
All other fields using the ^FN1 command (including this one: ^FT381,188^A0N,50,68^FD^FN1^FS) output the correct value, just not the generated QR code.
I found similar questions, however, none of which are using a ^FN command, and their suggestions do not work for my situation. Those links are listed here:
Print ZPLII QR to open url
ZPL QR code not printing what is in the string
Thanks for help and I would really like to learn what I am doing wrong.
The ^FNx commands are used with stored formats; they cannot be used in a "one-off" label format like you are showing. I am traveling and don't have a zebra printer to test this but basically you need to define the label format "template" using ^DF like:
^XA
^DFR:MYFORMAT.ZPL^FS
^LH0,0^LRN^FT100,50,0^A0N,30,30
^FO471,27^BQN,1,3^FN1^FS
^FT381,188^A0N,50,68^FN1^FS
^XZ
That stores the format as R:MYFORMAT.ZPL. Then you use ^XF to recall the format and provide the values for the ^FNx:
^XA
^XFR:MYFORMAT.ZPL^FS
^FN1^FDQA,CORELIMS.BARCODE^FS
^XZ
Note that you include the extra data params required by ^BQ in the ^FD string.
Hope that helps.

Given final block not properly padded. Such issues can arise if a bad key is used during decryption

Hi guys I encrypted school project but my AES saved txt has been deleted, I pictured it before and I filled a new file. But new AES key file is not equal to the typed in jpeg file. Which character is wrong I couldn't find it. Could you please help me.
Pic : https://i.stack.imgur.com/pAXzl.jpg
Text file : http://textuploader.com/dfop6
If you directly convert bytes with any value to Unicode you may lose information because some bytes will not correspond to a Unicode character, a whitespace character or other information that cannot be easily distinguished in printed out form.
Of course there may be ways to brute force your way out of this, but this could easily result in very complex code and possibly near infinite running time. Better start over, and if you want to use screen shots or similar printed text: base 64 or hex encode your results; those can be easily converted back.

Handle utf 8 characters in unix

I was trying to find a solution for my problem and after looking at the forums I couldn't so I'll explain my problem here.
We receive a csv file from a client with some special characters and encoded as unknown-8bit. We convert this csv file to xml using an awk script. With the xml file we make an API call to our system using utf-8 as default encoding. The response is an error with following information:
org.apache.xerces.impl.io.MalformedByteSequenceException: Invalid byte 1 of 1-byte UTF-8 sequence
The content of the file is as bellow:
151215901579-109617744500,sandra,sandra,Coesfeld,,Coesfeld,48653,DE,1,2.30,ASTRA 16V CAVALIER CALIBRA TURBO BLUE 10,53.82,GB,,.80,3,ASTRA 16V CAVALIER CALIBRA TURBO BLUE 10MM 4CORE IGNITION HT LEADS WIRES MLR.CR,,sandra#online.de,parcel1,Invalid Request,,%004865315500320004648880276,INTL,%004865315500320004648880276,1,INTL,DPD,180380,INTL,2.30,Send A2B Ltd,4th Floor,200 Gray’s Inn Road,LONDON,,WC1X8XZ,GBR,
I think the problem is in the field "200 Gray’s Inn Road" cause when I use utf-8 encoding it automatically converts "'" character by a x92 value.
Does anybody know how can I handle this?
Thanks in advance,
Sandra
Find out the actual encoding first, best would be asking the sender.
If you cannot do so, and also for sanity-checking, the unix command file is very useful for that (the linked page shows more options).
Next step, convert to UTF-8.
As it is obviously an ASCII-based encoding, you could just discard all non-ASCII or replace them on encoding, if that loss is acceptable.
As an alternative, open it in the editor of your choice and flip the encoding used for interpreting the data until you get something useful. My guess is you'll have either Latin-1 or Windows-1252, but check it for yourself.
Last step, do what you wanted to do, in comforting knowledge that you now have valid UTF-8.
Obviously, don't pretend it's UTF-8 if it isn't. Find out what the encoding is, or replace all non-ASCII characters with the UTF-8 REPLACEMENT CHARACTER sequence 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD.
Since you are able to view this particular sample just fine, you apparently already know which encoding it is (even if you don't know that you know -- it would be whatever your current set-up is using) -- I would guess Windows-1252 which uses 0x92 for a curvy right single quote.

Please help identify multi-byte character encoding scheme on ASP Classic page

I'm working with a 3rd party (Commidea.com) payment processing system and one of the parameters being sent along with the processing result is a "signature" field. This is used to provide a SHA1 hash of the result message wrapped in an RSA encrypted envelope to provide both integrity and authenticity control. I have the API from Commidea but it doesn't give details of encoding and uses artificially created signatures derived from Base64 strings to illustrate the examples.
I'm struggling to work out what encoding is being used on this parameter and hoped someone might recognise the quite distinctive pattern. I initially thought it was UTF8 but having looked at the individual characters I am less sure.
Here is a short sample of the content which was created by the following code where I am looping through each "byte" in the string:
sig = Request.Form("signature")
For x = 1 To LenB(sig)
s = s & AscB(MidB(sig,x,1)) & ","
Next
' Print s to a debug log file
When I look in the log I get something like this:
129,0,144,0,187,0,67,0,234,0,71,0,197,0,208,0,191,0,9,0,43,0,230,0,19,32,195,0,248,0,102,0,183,0,73,0,192,0,73,0,175,0,34,0,163,0,174,0,218,0,230,0,157,0,229,0,234,0,182,0,26,32,42,0,123,0,217,0,143,0,65,0,42,0,239,0,90,0,92,0,57,0,111,0,218,0,31,0,216,0,57,32,117,0,160,0,244,0,29,0,58,32,56,0,36,0,48,0,160,0,233,0,173,0,2,0,34,32,204,0,221,0,246,0,68,0,238,0,28,0,4,0,92,0,29,32,5,0,102,0,98,0,33,0,5,0,53,0,192,0,64,0,212,0,111,0,31,0,219,0,48,32,29,32,89,0,187,0,48,0,28,0,57,32,213,0,206,0,45,0,46,0,88,0,96,0,34,0,235,0,184,0,16,0,187,0,122,0,33,32,50,0,69,0,160,0,11,0,39,0,172,0,176,0,113,0,39,0,218,0,13,0,239,0,30,32,96,0,41,0,233,0,214,0,34,0,191,0,173,0,235,0,126,0,62,0,249,0,87,0,24,0,119,0,82,0
Note that every other value is a zero except occasionally where it is 32 (0x20). I'm familiar with UTF8 where it represents characters above 127 by using two bytes but if this was UTF8 encoding then I would expect the "32" value to be more like 194 (0xC2) or (0xC3) and the other value would be greater than 0x80.
Ultimately what I'm trying to do is convert this signature parameter into a hex encoded string (eg. "12ab0528...") which is then used by the RSA/SHA1 function to verify the message is intact. This part is already working but I can't for the life of me figure out how to get the signature parameter decoded.
For historical reasons we are having to use classic ASP and the SHA1/RSA functions are javascript based.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Regards,
Craig.
Update: Tried looking into UTF-16 encoding on Wikipedia and other sites. Can't find anything to explain why I am seeing only 0x20 or 0x00 in the (assumed) high order byte positions. I don't think this is relevant any more as the example below shows other values in this high order position.
Tried adding some code to log the values using Asc instead of AscB (Len,Mid instead of LenB,MidB too). Got some surprising results. Here is a new stream of byte-wise characters followed by the equivalent stream of word-wise (if you know what I mean) characters.
21,0,83,1,214,0,201,0,88,0,172,0,98,0,182,0,43,0,103,0,88,0,103,0,34,33,88,0,254,0,173,0,188,0,44,0,66,0,120,1,246,0,64,0,47,0,110,0,160,0,84,0,4,0,201,0,176,0,251,0,166,0,211,0,67,0,115,0,209,0,53,0,12,0,243,0,6,0,78,0,106,0,250,0,19,0,204,0,235,0,28,0,243,0,165,0,94,0,60,0,82,0,82,0,172,32,248,0,220,2,176,0,141,0,239,0,34,33,47,0,61,0,72,0,248,0,230,0,191,0,219,0,61,0,105,0,246,0,3,0,57,32,54,0,34,33,127,0,224,0,17,0,224,0,76,0,51,0,91,0,210,0,35,0,89,0,178,0,235,0,161,0,114,0,195,0,119,0,69,0,32,32,188,0,82,0,237,0,183,0,220,0,83,1,10,0,94,0,239,0,187,0,178,0,19,0,168,0,211,0,110,0,101,0,233,0,83,0,75,0,218,0,4,0,241,0,58,0,170,0,168,0,82,0,61,0,35,0,184,0,240,0,117,0,76,0,32,0,247,0,74,0,64,0,163,0
And now the word-wise data stream:
21,156,214,201,88,172,98,182,43,103,88,103,153,88,254,173,188,44,66,159,246,64,47,110,160,84,4,201,176,251,166,211,67,115,209,53,12,243,6,78,106,250,19,204,235,28,243,165,94,60,82,82,128,248,152,176,141,239,153,47,61,72,248,230,191,219,61,105,246,3,139,54,153,127,224,17,224,76,51,91,210,35,89,178,235,161,114,195,119,69,134,188,82,237,183,220,156,10,94,239,187,178,19,168,211,110,101,233,83,75,218,4,241,58,170,168,82,61,35,184,240,117,76,32,247,74,64,163
Note the second pair of byte-wise characters (83,1) seem to be interpreted as 156 in the word-wise stream. We also see (34,33) as 153 and (120,1) as 159 and (220,2) as 152. Does this give any clues as the encoding? Why are these 15[2369] values apparently being treated differently from other values?
What I'm trying to figure out is whether I should use the byte-wise data and carry out some post-processing to get back to the intended values or if I should trust the word-wise data with whatever implicit decoding it is apparently performing. At the moment, neither seem to give me a match between data content and signature so I need to change something.
Thanks.
Quick observation tells me that you are likely dealing with UTF-16. Start from there.

Trying to parse a file that looks partically hex encoded

I'm trying to parse a file that looks sort of hex encoded but mostly not. I contacted support for the vendor who created the file and they said that they it can be parsed using "an 0x116 offset"
What is a 0x116 offset?
It took me 2 weeks to get an answer from the vendor on my first question, so I wanted to see if someone here could help me make sense of! Thank you!
"0x116 offset" means nothing. It could be a value that needs to be added to words or subtracted to remove some naive encoding, or anything else for that matter.
Could you post a part of the file? Is it binary or text? Could you define "mostly not"?
What vendor/software package/device does this file come from?

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