201108131938 ji1vn

solved decrypted manual

A Gandhi quotation with the typo 'insigificant', which is A858's own. 3DES, key MD5(name).

Metadata

Post ID: ji1vn
Title: 201108131938 → 2011-08-13 19:38 on A858's clock
Posted (UTC): 2011-08-13 23:38:20
Timezone: UTC−4 · title 19:38 against posted 23:38 UTC
Author: [deleted]
Account: A858DE45F56D9BC9 main account
Subreddit: r/A858DE45F56D9BC9 the main subreddit
Category: S solved 3DES → text
Content: Quotes
Size: 192 hex characters · 96 bytes
Cipher: 3DES-EDE2 (two-key Triple DES), ECB, PKCS7
Key: MD5(A858DE45F56D9BC9) = 34a14a42e98ff96095af56604e290cae (name)
New here: A Gandhi quotation, with a typo that is A858's own. (new results)
Sources: arctic-shift · body from arctic-shift
Links: Reddit · Arctic Shift · JSON
Score · comments: 21 · 12
Tags: pre-automation2011Solved special postmanualarctic-onlykey: namequotesfound by this project

From the post to its content

As posted (encrypted)

A6A03A B0CB08 110B98 DEF3F3 2F9226 1E3F13 AA1DBF 0DCCB3 631D24 C4000B A253FF 738472 7BECEB 5A5590 81F6C4 05D79B E73CD2 9E2FD7 BF5400 8F9B50 E878D7 F34BD8 F601E8 CA69EE 931E4F CBF9CC 1D14B2 8E6011 0014C7 15E3CE 425024 B6318A

Decrypt. Key: MD5(name) ECB. 3DES-EDE2, then strip the PKCS7 padding.

Decrypted

Whatever you do will be insigificant, but it is very important that you do it.
   -Gandhi

Explanation

Write-up

I have been going through some lesser known posts that are not in the auto analysis archive, amongst these I managed to find a solution for ji1vn (title 201108131938) which was originally found here (line breaks added for readability):

A6A03A B0CB08 110B98 DEF3F3 2F9226 1E3F13 AA1DBF 0DCCB3
631D24 C4000B A253FF 738472 7BECEB 5A5590 81F6C4 05D79B
E73CD2 9E2FD7 BF5400 8F9B50 E878D7 F34BD8 F601E8 CA69EE
931E4F CBF9CC 1D14B2 8E6011 0014C7 15E3CE 425024 B6318A

Unusually it is grouped in 6 hex characters (3 bytes) instead of 8 or 16, but that is only the formatting. Put together it is 96 bytes, which decrypts using des-ede-ecb with the same password/key as the other posts from around this time, MD5(A858DE45F56D9BC9) = 34a14a42e98ff96095af56604e290cae, to this:

Whatever you do will be insigificant, but it is very important that you do it.
   -Gandhi

The quote is commonly (and probably wrongly) attributed to Gandhi. The misspelling "insigificant" is in the decrypted text itself, I could not find it in any of the copies of the quote online, so it looks like it was typed by hand.

All the steps as one command

echo 'A6A03A B0CB08 110B98 DEF3F3 2F9226 1E3F13 AA1DBF 0DCCB3 631D24 C4000B A253FF 738472 7BECEB 5A5590 81F6C4 05D79B E73CD2 9E2FD7 BF5400 8F9B50 E878D7 F34BD8 F601E8 CA69EE 931E4F CBF9CC 1D14B2 8E6011 0014C7 15E3CE 425024 B6318A' \
  | xxd -r -p \
  | openssl enc -d -des-ede-ecb -K "$(printf 'A858DE45F56D9BC9' | md5sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"; echo

Solution summary

Method: 3DES-ECB, key MD5(name)
Result: Gandhi quotation with the typo 'insigificant'
Explanation: Arctic-only; the typo is A858's own
Re-checked: 3DES MD5(name) -> quote