Stego 11

This mission has kept my mind busy for a long time; a cycle of being frustrated and giving it up, and then digging into it again after a long period of time. I have "picked the right pixels", but I am still at the encryption part. This is perhaps a little tricky to discuss while avoiding spoilers, so feel free to PM me if you want to give me a helping hand; I need someone to evaluate my calculations and filter out possibly wrong interpretations.

EDIT: Finally solved

Thanks, BhaaL.

by **motley84** on Mon Apr 05, 2010 7:00 pm ([msg=37741]see Re: Stego 11[/msg])

Well that's a bit of alot to ask, but should i be concerned about the scattered low minority pixels only OR about the possible manipulations of every pixel value? I ask the first part of the question because "pick a color" could imply picking something more hideous

So I found the pattern in the blue mega-pixels and noticed that one pixel was different about the pattern on the first row of every blue mega-pixel. I thought that may be they were to mark out a row, but I can't figure out a way to get data from the rows. I've tried interpreting the pixels in the marked row as ternary and binary strings, I've tried just counting the number of pixels in the row that are "different" but nothing seems to give data. Am I on the right track at all? Am I just looking for a password encoded straight into the picture, or am I looking for data that can be decrypted or decompressed into a file that gives the password (i.e. is there a middle man in the process).

Also, do the different pixels in the yellow and black parts have anything to do with the solution or are they there just to throw you off?

by **ApEk** on Tue Aug 10, 2010 7:36 pm ([msg=43533]see Re: Stego 11[/msg])

I'm stuck too. Created a Python script to print the total number of different pixels and the totals of each color.
Found 14 colors, 5 rogue colors. (rogue as in a color which occurrence is minuscule compared to the others)
Found the total of the rogue pixels to equal 64. Then I tried producing binary based off of even or odd offset. But that didn't work, ie some chars > 127. Could someone pm me on what I'm doing wrong, or reply if this isn't even the right direction. Doesn't help Nines is mia.

Edit: nvm way off course there

Am I correct in assuming I should extract the values from each black pixel as a binary bitstring?

nub here, few questions as I am currently at a stand-still on this mission:

#1. would reading each pixel from #1 (top left) to the last one (bottom right) in rows, sequentially be on the right track?
#2. if not, am i barking up the wrong tree looking into the base64 encoded data?
#3. I looked through this thread a few times... don't see any hints that I could grasp... perhaps someone could point in just a TAD into some kind of a direction.

Ty and Please remove any of my questions mods if you feel they give too much away (which I would be surprised as I think I am completely lost at this point.)

Alright this is a tough mission. I found the pixels. I looked at their position relative to many, many different things, and I think I found some hex. Hopefully someone can tell me if this is relevant at all. Thanks in advance.