A friend gave me this binary string as a coded introduction, but we haven't been able to figure it out after several days. Could someone help identify the encoding and explain the steps needed to decipher it?
01000110 01110001 01110110 01100111 01110110 01100110 01110100 01100011 01110000 01110110 00100000 01111001 01111000 01100111 01100011 01111100 01100011 01110000 01100011 00100000 01101110 01100011 01110101 00100000 01110100 01100011 01110010 01101011 01100110 01110001 00100000 01100110 01100111 00100000 01110010 01110000 01101110 01110001 00100000 01110010 01101011 01101110 01110001 00100000 01110010 01100111 01110100 01110001 00100000 01110101 01100111 01101110 01100100 01110001 00100000 01100011 00100000 01100011 01100101 01100011 01101110 00100000 01110101 01100111 01110101 00100000 01100110 01110001 01110000 01100110 01110110 00100000 01100111 00100000 01110010 01101011 01100111 01110100 01100110 01100011 01110011
3 Answers
The binary clue is fairly direct: eight bits at a time represent one character. Converting the string to ASCII gives the text above, but the comments don’t establish a reliable final plaintext. The next step would require an additional clue about the cipher, language, or key rather than guessing from the partially readable output.
The groups are 8-bit binary values, so the first step is to convert each group to a number and then interpret those numbers as ASCII characters. That produces: “Fqvgvftcpv yxgc|cpc ncu tcrkfq fg rpnq rknq rgtq ugnbq c cecn ugu fqpfv g rkgtfcs”. It still isn’t readable English, so the binary is probably only the first layer and another cipher was applied afterward. A Caesar or other shift cipher would be a reasonable next thing to test.
You can use an ASCII character table to perform the conversion manually, or a binary-to-text converter to check it quickly. The resulting text contains spaces and recognizable patterns, but it also has unusual characters such as “|”, which suggests that a simple shift may not be the entire solution. Try testing different shifts or checking whether the bytes were transformed before being written as binary.
It may also be worth checking whether the bits in each byte were reversed or rotated, although the ordinary ASCII conversion is the most sensible place to start.
Thanks! I wasn’t sure whether the binary itself was the complete code or just the first step.