Re: A Little Decoding Challenge
John, I think I can explain what I've done so far without giving away enough to spoil anyone else's fun.
I started out by putting together a small program that would break down your example messages, to show me how often each letter was used. I also grabbed several of your longer forum posts and the text from your web page so that I'd have many example sentences for how you personally write. The program broke that down as well to show how much each letter was used.
There is a pretty typical curve to how many times each letter is used in typical english sentences, and the posts you've written were close enough to that to be considered normal. What I wanted to see was if the encoded example message followed a similar curve. It did, or at least it was a stretched out version of it.
This let me make a few guesses. First off, this told me that your encryption method is almost certainly a letter-for-letter substitution, rather than a hash. It also means that the letter-for-letter substitution isn't the kind where a "T" means "B" now, but now that it's been used once already the next "T" means "D". I don't recall the name for those kinds of shifting methods, but I believe I've ruled that out because of how everything still fit with the letter curve you use in normal conversation.
The lowercase a was used so much that it is clearly some sort of delimiter. For now I'm just assuming it is a space between words, though the number of them is so high that it seems to have a separate purpose that I haven't figured out yet.
The curve is stretched out to basically twice the size I see in your normal conversations, meaning everything is case sensitive. A capital "D" in your encrypted message is not the same thing as a lower case "d" if things were to get translated back into the original secret message.
If the letter-for-letter substitution only used twice as many encoded letters for the sake of recreating the upper and lower case of the original message, then I wouldn't expect to see the list double like this. It's entirely possible that your encoded example messages contain Most of the 26 letters of the alphabet in lower case, but it's not likely it contains almost all 26 letters in upper case too. So this leads me to believe that you may be doing some randomizing when you encode a message. What I mean by this is, the original message could be "rrrrr", but your system may have 2 separate letters that an "r" can become, so at random it will decide which to use. Those 5 "r"'s could be encoded to be something like "tNNtt", where the "t" and the "N" are interchangeable and both turn back into an "r" when the message is decoded. It's my current theory anyway.
I also listed all of the words in your encoded example sentences to look for patterns. For this I was assuming that the letter "a" separates words. I found 2 pairs of words that are identical except one has 1 extra letter at its end. The game was on trying to figure out what those words could be, taking into consideration my charts of letter frequency to help me guess what the most likely letters were in some of the spots. For example, the letter "e" is the most common letter you normally use (as it basically is for us all), and the letter "v" is pretty far down on the list. When I look at an encoded word, "HG33r1I" for example, I know I'm looking for a 7 letter word that Can become an 8 letter word by adding 1 letter to the end. None of the letters in the word match any others, except for the double letters "33".
For a while I found myself wanting that word to be "pattern". It seemed like the words pattern and patterns might both show up in your encrypted examples, all of the letters were unique, and the double letter was in the right spot. Seemed like a good start. The "3" is the 6th most used letter in your example, which makes this plausible since the letter "t" is your second most used in normal conversation. The "H", "G", and "1" matched up similarly well with "p", "a", and "n". "r" for "e" and "I" for "n" were too far off of expected for me to be comfortable however.
I've ultimately set the above plan aside because an odd bump in the letter graph reminded me that I'm possibly dealing with 2 code letters equaling the same decoded letter. This means that my list of code letter frequency can't accurately be relied on until I figure out how those add up. If I'm on the right track with this then it may mean the order of these will be different. I'm not sure of a good way to explain what I mean, or at least not one I can type out quickly enough now that I see I'm very low on time.
I've been running errands for most of the day and it's time for work soon. If I'm not too tired I may take another look at this after work, before I go to sleep. Hopefully I'm not going in entirely the wrong direction, but if I am hopefully another participant will jump in and show me where I've taken a wrong turn. haha!
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