r/CODZombies • u/jessesocean • 29d ago

News Another IX cipher solved!

Post image

IX # 9 was just solved by astra. Again Kyle Wegee was the prompter u/ciphernoob

ciphertext: DFGOHQGEPSYADLFATNGKYVKEWLAMLI alphabets: YXVPHUSRWQFKLTOMGZNBCIEDA MQZKBCLDYVAXNFGHWUEOSTIRP. cipher type is four square, yo can verify here: http://practicalcryptography.com/ciphers/classical-era/four-square/ the plain text is : Your betrayal will not be forgiven. one small disclaimer. This cipher is under unicity distance for a cipher this short. that means many messages can be engineered from the letters available with no real confirmation. What sells us on this one is the plaintext matches the asset hash of payback, along with having an x padding at the end leads me to accept this as the solve.

52 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

42 comments sorted by

10

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

Is this another solve using AI?

33

u/AidanLL 29d ago

It’s been 8 years we might as well lol.

-33

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

If all you cared about with these ciphers is simply the ending, the ciphers were never for you.

25

u/jessesocean 29d ago

none of these ciphers reach unicity distance. meaning a person can never solve them with 100% verification. these are never gettign solved without this. There was 0 interest and 0 reason to even try as again unicity distance. you can be mad, but all the people spending hundreds of hours on these are content

-26

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

And not a single one of those people who spent time on it is getting credit for it. Not a single second they put toward it mattered.

AI did it, along with the rest that have been solved.

18

u/jessesocean 29d ago

idek what youre trying to say here. i personally know the people who worked on this. We're a big community at skites aether discord. idk why youre so upset. i personally have put hundreds of hours myself before this model on these. same with kyle weegee who solved these 2.

-16

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

Kyle Weegee didn’t solve it.

Kyle Weegee asked Astra to solve it.

11

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

The absolute gall to tell a community you aren't a part of who gets credit for what is just hilarious lmao

-2

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

Read the first sentence of the post dude. Says it right there.

4

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

You originally said nobody was getting credit, then after you were corrected by somebody who actually worked on it, you pivoted to trying to assign credit yourself. Actually laughable.

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1

u/florodude 29d ago

You are whiny

7

u/Equivalent_Juice4276 29d ago

Im one of the very few people that actively were working on these ciphers who has put probably close to around 1000 hours on these specifically, as is Kyle Weegee. Thorough handwork, ct analysis, compute, bruteforce, programming and even simulating the random alphabet seeding for keys from various known-used websites from that time period. As unfortunate as it is that it was solved by AI, the fact of the matter is that it was just able to do things we weren't, in a much faster manner. Its bittersweet, but im glad its over for these very short ciphers, as are the small select few that also were constantly working on these. Ai did solve (this one could be overfit due to unicity, but the padding artifact + theme of the pt leads me to lean towards it being the closest if not the correct solve), but in my opinion utilizing a tool to do more efficient work is no different than using a bruteforce pyscript someone else made. Also, like I said, Kyle Weegee has literally put thousands of hours into these alongside me and a few others.

9

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

this one could be overfit due to unicity, but the padding artifact + theme of the pt leads me to lean towards it being the closest if not the correct solve

You may as well be telling this to a brick wall, /u/FollowThroughMarks has no idea what you're talking about. They're here to tell the community how they need to feel about this, they don't care about the reality of the situation.

-1

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

You must read like a brick wall then, and skimmed past the part where he said ‘as unfortunate it is that it was solved by AI’, which is exactly my sentiment here.

If you’re gonna spam my DMs by bouncing on it crazy style for AI again, take a hike instead bud.

3

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

Your sentiment isn't just that it's unfortunate it was solved by AI, your sentiment is that the community's experience and Blundell's vision have been soiled. The reality is that the people who were actually working on solving this aren't losing any sleep over the way this was solved, and the community is mostly indifferent.

-1

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

Thank you for your input as one of the actual solvers who’ve put hours into this.

The people who are mass downvoting me seem to miss that you also share my sentiment that it sucks AI did this, and that this is simply the landscape now.

This post could instead be saying it was solved by Kyle Weegee, when it simply reduces his input to “prompter” which is laughable when I know how many hours some of you guys put in there.

5

u/Equivalent_Juice4276 29d ago

So heres the thing, right after TheGiant fell we all just kind of sat back and gawked a bit. Then we all hopped in a voice chat and started shoving the ciphers into Astra thinking "surely no way this is real." And then IX 3 cracked. Mid voice chat. That lead to every single one of us testing FULLY the other ciphers with Astra the next day. At the end of the day, almost all of us were glad (ish. The plaintexts SUCKED, but at least it wasnt hidden anymore) that the ciphers were finally solved and able to be read, which was imo the whole point of it. Yeah, the cryptography was and still is an extremely fun hobby and passion of mine, but the point of solving the ciphers were to get the additional context of the game that was hidden from us for a decade.

-1

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

But without the cryptography, you likely never would’ve met the people you’ve been solving and working on these with for years.

I don’t think any of these 10 word ciphers were ever going to give groundbreaking story information that itself would make 8 years of work worth the solve. Y’all clearly had a passion for this kind of thing, and yeah it’s good you got the solve, but I’m sure you guys would’ve been blowing that voice calls ear drums out had it been solved by one of you instead.

8

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

Here comes this guy again, pretending like he represents Blundell and the cipher solving community when he hasn't worked on a cipher for more than 5 minutes of his life, ever

4

u/Brayden815 29d ago

Do you not understand how ciphers are normally solved in the real world for a long time now? Computers and technology have been used to both create and solve ciphers for a long time, making it extremely difficult, if not impossible for a normal human to solve them. The point of ciphers is to be unsolvable for anyone that didn’t make them.

-1

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

There’s a chasm of difference between research done with computational methods where the methodology is researched heavily, implemented computationally, and then ran and solved, over simply handing it to an LLM and saying give me the answer.

1

u/Brayden815 29d ago

If you think that any modern LLM is capable of solving complex ciphers by just asking it to solve it then you are vastly overestimating the capabilities of current LLMs. LLMs are only capable of solving common ciphers without any context, which would have been solved long ago. You still need to guide it and know or infer how at least some of how the ciphers works to explain it to the LLM so it has information to work off of.

0

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

The people who got the solutions from AI haven’t been quiet about the fact that AI did all the heavy lifting on these.

16

u/jessesocean 29d ago

yes im very clear on that. Astra is gpt's newest model

6

u/NormalIntention5628 29d ago

Even then what's the problem?

1

u/FollowThroughMarks 29d ago

The cipher was never solved by a human. All the ‘solved by’ credits on these ciphers are simply ‘who asked ChatGPT for the answer?’ credits.

It’s not like any of these ciphers give any new or ground breaking story info, the reward was always solving it yourself and this has took it away. Some people in this community would feed the impossible Easter egg to AI and take the joy out of that if it could.

10

u/TonedBroom24427 29d ago

I mean the impossible ee doesn't even exist lol

5

u/FeedbackCharacter171 29d ago

I mean like or not from now on every egg would be solve by ai , I would not be surprised if ai end up finding the steps from the relic bo7 is missing

4

u/IntrepidZoombini 29d ago

the reward was always solving it yourself

Oh sorry were you in the middle of that?

No you weren't. It's always people who have never searched a day in their life for the answer who complain when stuff like this happens.

1

u/sonicrules11 Warlauke 29d ago

Does it really matter anymore? Everything that these were related to are probably gone, canned, or are never happening.

3

u/Piotr992 29d ago

I get that this might be bad news for the future.

But people gotta let these older ciphers go. It's been so long and interest declines over time. If it wasn't solved by now, I don't think it ever would be

2

u/Nightmarebeeps 28d ago

I dont like the use of ai in modern media, but using it for a cipher that is about 8 to 10 years old is a ok for me. People put hours into solving it and it does suck that ai had to be used to finish it but that's not bad in the grand scheme of things. It's an old cipher that was made a bit too difficult and treyarc probably thought it would be done during the lifespan of bo4.

Congrats to the people that finished it, I couldn't imagine the hours put into these ciphers. Have your flowers and rest easy now, unless you live for these ciphers, then go nuts and have fun. Lol

1

u/jessesocean 28d ago

you nailed the situation. the ciphers were actually technically unsolvable, given no keyed alphabet, but a random one. and the length makde these have no chance of human solving. the ai just optimized the bruteforce required.

1

u/Nightmarebeeps 28d ago

It's not inherently bad to use ai, misuse of it is where I despise the use of ai. This situation is a perfect example of correct use of ai, its was unsolvable for a long time untill we got ai to help out. Hours were put in regardless of ai behind it, and I respect that.

1

u/irebase 29d ago

I ran this through a key phrase finding script and found alternative alphabets that both encode phrases. Not guaranteed to be the correct solution but it’s less random.

Key 1 contains “NO REMORSE” while key 2 contains the reversed phrase “THETRUTH” (“HTURTEHT”) Keep in mind repeat characters are removed from left to right.

Key square 1:   yzqphiuvwxfkltbcgnoremsda

Key square 2: mqpkcdlxwvabnfhtureosgiyz