Amazon.com Hosting Crypto-Contest

vic20 pointed us over to Amazon's crypto contest/promotional item. Crack the message, and you can get signed editions of books like Cryptonomicon, Applied Cryptography, The Code Book, and Between Silk and Cyanide as well as LEGO Mindstorms. They'll be giving more hints as the contest goes on, with a deadline of 11:59 PM PST Oct. 29.

Comments

Time and some strategy

[Shaheen]

Well, not that I'm a crypto expert, but let's see how quickly a brute force decipher could take...

Okay, I obviously have to make a few assumptions. First off, I assume each number between dashes is a single alphanumeric. And since I said alphanumeric, you know I mean A-Z and 0-9.

There are 61 alphanumerics in this message. HOWEVER, I believe we can safely assume that each line is a phrase on its own. If so, we can solve each separately. The breakdown is 10, 11, 15, 13, and 12 (yes, that adds to 61).

So, we have 36^n combinations for each line (n being the # of alphanumerics in each line).

Sum(36^n for all n) = approx(2.1249 * 10^23)

Let's say that it takes 1 millisecond to calculate a single permutation. (I have *no* idea whether that is a fair estimate - I'm definitely no expert in cryptography).

This would make worst case time for solving the code would be 7.011 * 10^12 years. Of course, this doesn't rule out the possibility that there are multiple valid solutions (ie. the code interpreted differently still results in a valid English statement) and other such weird phenomena. I would guess the best chance to cracking this thing, at first, would be to find the weights of each of the numbers between the dashes, and compare that to the English alphabet's weight. At least, that might get you an E or something. I'll let someone who knows what he's talking about comment on that.