I was wondering if anyone else has wondered the same thing about the wierd text at the bottom of a lot of the spam, and if anyone has ever used PHP to create any cipher tools in an attempt to crack the following:
Columnar Transposition ciphers Word transposition ciphers Franklin-Dumas cipher
My first round is creating a script that goes through and takes various combinations (1st letter of each word, 3rd letter of every 3rd word, etc., etc., etc.,) I guess this is considered letter transposition ciphering. I have some vague ideas to incorporate dictionary database.. so if my script attempts to decrypt a peice of text with "method 402" and the result contains actual words from a dictionary, it will flag it or save it to a seperate database.. something along those lines.
This is just for fun... no one is sponsoring/financing anything here.. just wondering if anyone is interested in sharing ideas and/or code, philosophy, etc. Of course, this could be done in any language, or even on paper... I can burn a ream of notebook paper fast doing double columnar by hand but my interest is using PHP specifically. I figure, even if my friend is just crazy and no one is sending secret messages inside spam, it is at least going to be fun, rewarding in knowledge and the sharing of information and ideas. And if we do crack something, maybe Fred Wrixon can mention PHP in his next book. :)
Kris
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