When “666–55–2–999” Means You’re Okay!
When “666–55–2–999” Means You’re Okay!
We have advanced so much as a society, and we sometimes take our modern Internet/smart phone-driven world for granted. Just 23 years ago, we were typically using this type of device to send our messages:
And, so in 2020, the Nokia 3310 was released with the slogan, “Don’t be bored. Be totally board.” It was a classic, and you could use it for weeks without ever having to charge it up. You could also pop off the back and replace the battery when you liked. For styling, you could also remove the cover and snap on a new one. And, if it fell from a great high, you just snapped it all back into place. In fact, if looking in some of the drawers of your house, you might just find one, and it’s still likely to work!
But you can see there’s a distinct lack of buttons to press and no keyboard. So, our next generation will probably wonder how we managed to run Whats App on these phones. And, so, we will tell them, that we didn’t use the Internet to send messages from our devices. At this, they will show a blank face.
You will say, “Our messages were sent by SMS, and we pressed the buttons many times to get the letters.”
Again, we will get a blank face.
“See, an ‘e’ is 3 and the 3”.
Again, a blank face. And you give up!
The “key” to this, is the mappings of the letters to the number keys:
And, so, if it is was “raining”, we would “tap”:
777–2–444–66–444–66–4
The 777 is three taps of “7” to get “R”. Unfortunately, it was not the most efficient of codes, as the most popular letter of “E” has two presses, and “R” and “S” have three and four presses, while “J” has only one press. But, some people could “text” like crazy, and they let their thumbs to the talking. Basically, it went back to the days when we had dials on phones and where we could map the letters to the numbers of the dial.
Many will remember that each key gave off a different tone, and you would often “hear” people texting. And, if you were really smart, you could actually determine what they were sending — just by listening to the tones. I remember trying to do this when I travelled on public transport.
So, can you decode this SMS message:
8–44–33–0–22–666–999–0–7777–8–666–666–3–0–666–66–0–8–44–33–0–22–88–777–66–444–66–4–0–3–33–7777–55
And, so, to take you back two decades, I’ve written a CTF SMS generator:
https://asecuritysite.com/ctf/ctf_79
and a decoder:
https://asecuritysite.com/ctf/ctf_80
Conclusions
Please don’t take this amazing machine — the Internet — for granted. It is the greatest advancement ever in the history of human kind.