The Alien Cipher

The Alien Cipher

Can you solve this:

The art of solving puzzles is often at the core of cybersecurity skills. Whether you are twiddling bits or searching for byte patterns, there’s a core skill of understanding how to convert something that is hidden to something that can be seen.

And, so, Capture The Flags (CTF) and cipher challenges are great ways to train your mind in solving these puzzles. For this, I’ve created an alien cipher code. It is fairly easy to solve, as there is no cipher keys used, and where it is just basically an encoding method. For this, we can use UTF-8 to extend our character set with a hexadecimal or integer value. The alphabet we will use is:

⏃⏚☊⎅⟒⎎☌⊑⟟⟊☍⌰⋔⋏⍜⌿⍾⍀⌇⏁⎍⎐⍙⌖⊬⋉

and where ‘a’ is ⏃ and ‘b’ is ⏚ (don’t ask me why an alien might think an earth symbol is a b). In C#, we can then derive the coding from [here]:

     public static string getAlien(string s)
        {
            s = s.ToLower();
            string rtn = "";

        

            string[] mapping = { "⏃", "⏚", "☊", "⎅",
                "⟒", "⎎", "☌", "⊑", "⟟",
                "⟊", "☍", "⌰", "⋔", "⋏", "⍜",
                "⌿","⍾", "⍀", /* PQR */
                "⌇", "⏁",  /* ST */
                "⎍", "⎐", /* UV */
                "⍙", "⌖", "⊬", "⋉" }; /* WXYZ */

            foreach (char ch in s)
            {
                int val = ((int)ch - (int)'a');
                try
                {

                    if (ch == ' ') rtn = rtn + "  ";
                    else rtn = rtn + mapping[val];


                }
                catch (Exception ex) { }

            }
            return (rtn);

We can see that we map an ‘a’ to the UTF-8 value of “⏃”, and a ‘b’ to “⏚”.

So, can you read this message that Bob the Alien sent to Alice the Human:

⍙⟒ ☊⍜⋔⟒ ⟟⋏ ⌿⟒⏃☊⟒

The solution generator is here:

And, if you are bored, why not try 97 different ciphers here: