Dialogues From Atlantis Writeup
Listen carefully, some texts hold deep secrets
Mission Briefing
Greetings, Special Agent K. One of our clients, a wealthy art collector from Monaco, is requesting we help her find a recorded dialogue between Critias, Hermocrates, Timaeus and Soscrates.
In her quest to unravel the mysteries regarding the ancient city of Atlantis, our client wishes to gather all evidence possible as to where the location of the lost city truly is. Getting stuck a fair bit into her endeavors, she has reached out to the Tiberian Order to decipher a piece of text.
Our client believes this text to be of vital importance to prove the existence of Atlantis as a city. Whether it will lead directly to the discovery of the city is doubtful. Nonetheless, it’s of great importance to unravel it’s meaning.
I trust your ability to deal with ciphers and ancient dialogues in this matter. You find the text below. In the end, this will lead to another Contract Card if you manage to complete this assignment.
As always. Special Agent K, the contract is yours, if you choose to accept.
Methodology
The task begins with decoding hexadecimal, and for this, I utilized cryptii, a tool that makes the decrypting and encoding process a lot easier. Alternatively, I could have used cyberchef, but cryptii’s format allows for reading much more text information.
ROT47 is a simple character substitution cipher that replaces each character in a piece of text with the 47th character in the ASCII table. So, for example, the letter A would be replaced with the symbol >, while the letter B would be replaced with the character?.
This cipher is often used to obfuscate text so that it is not immediately readable but can still be decoded relatively easily. ROT47 is sometimes also referred to as ROT-47 or Rotate 47.
One of the benefits of using ROT47 is that it can be applied to both text and images, which makes it a versatile tool for hiding information in plain sight. However, it should be noted that ROT47 is not a very secure cipher and can easily be broken by someone with even a basic knowledge of cryptography.
Base64 encoding is a process of translating binary data into ASCII text. Each character in the Base64 alphabet represents six bits of information. This approach allows for efficient data transmission since there is very little overhead.
One everyday use for Base64 encoding is to store binary data in a database where it might otherwise be garbled or lost. Another benefit is to send binary data through email, which would otherwise not be possible.
Base64 encoding is also used to encode data in URLs to transmit it over the internet safely. This is especially important for sensitive information like passwords or credit card numbers.
Overall, Base64 encoding is a handy tool for transmitting binary data. It is efficient and relatively simple to use.
This plaintext is Critias By Plato. Critias is one of Plato’s later dialogues, written around 360 BCE. It is unfinished, and Critias breaks off the dialogue in the middle of his speech. The discussion concerns the story of Atlantis, which Critias claims to have heard from his grandfather Critias, a member of Solon’s expedition to Egypt. I find it a beautiful piece of work, and if you want to read more, here is a link. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html
End of the Atlantis Dialogue
I inputted the Critias text into a regex and used /([A-Z])\w+/g to distinguish between any abnormalities in the text, which ultimately led me to find 3pB2oiW, which is the bit.ly link that leads to the contract card.
Tip on Learning More About Cryptography
A profound book in anyone’s collection is “An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography” by Hoffstein, Pipher, and Silverman. It covers many of the essential topics in cryptography with a mathematical approach that makes it both rigorous and understandable. This book is an undergraduate-level text, so it does not go into the more advanced topics that one might see in a graduate text. However, it is still an excellent book for anyone interested in cryptography. One of the things that makes this book so great is the way that it explains things. The authors use mathematical notation and terminology to ensure that everything is rigorously defined. This makes it much easier to understand what is going on than if the authors had just used plain English.
