Discussion
Mystery encryption key: p3s6v9y$B&E)H@Mc
Any idea where this comes from? There are a few web hits, including this list of similarly-shaped strings that includes it: https://pastebin.com/0UTJYhBA
It feels like it's some kind of poor rand() LCG-ish thing trivially converted to ASCII, but I'm really curious if anyone has a good guess.
A certain popular VTuber software uses it as an XOR pad obfuscation for its config files... (I derived it statistically, didn't look at the code)
@lina so far i think i've determined the charset to be
abcdefghjkmnpqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHJKMNPQRSTUVWXYZ23456789!/$%?&*()-+@
so lowercase sans [ilo], uppercase sans [ILO], and those symbols. and by charset i mean it's *in this order*
@lina 441 of these strings alternate between incrementing 34 and 35 positions (i.e., +34, +35, +34, +35 ... or +35, +34, +35, +34 ...). The other 559 skip a 35 in *one* position. No string from the provided set skips a 34, or skips more than once.
@lina Plotting the positions of these skips gives an interesting pattern, but I don't know what this means.
@lina Okay after reading some instances on GitHub (the search being one of the things it's irreplacable at), I think I've mostly solved it.
Once upon a time there *was* a website that purports to generate encryption keys for you hxxps://www[.]allkeysgenerator[.]com/Random/Security-Encryption-Key-Generator.aspx (It's down now)
My conclusion from comments left next to these strings was that these are generated on this particular website. (1/3)
@lina where it comes from, or why are they using it? Because looking at the pastebin date and name, I would not rule out someone just googling "128bit keys" and giving it a few scrolls down the list before copypasting it
@lina vtube studio? Or is it warudo? Both of them are popular and come to mind
@lina Suggested by AI:
base85 encoded(but v not in base85, maybe z85)
I got to a website that encode/decode them: https://cryptii.com/pipes/ascii85-encoding/
@commdserv It's trivially not base85 because the list has characters out of range for that. It's also clearly following some kind of pattern in generation not explainable like that. It also doesn't match the z85 dictionary.
If I wanted the bullshit generation machine's opinion I'd have asked it myself, thanks.
@lina okay, sure. but maybe I don't have enough attention to notice that any char out of z85 dict...
Unlike the pastebin list, this one is a bit regular. Every other character is a "normal" letter; then the "special" chars are 3,6,9, followed by SHIFT 4, 8, 0, 2.
Wouldn't surprise me if this was just created manually.
@amethyst That string is in the pastebin, and every single line follows roughly that pattern. It's math, not manual.
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