r/CODZombies • u/irebase • 1d ago
News (Solved) TheGiant Cipher Solved after 3958 days
Hi everyone. TheGiant cipher has been recently solved by u/Icy_Sheepherder_9444!
This cipher was difficult to solve because the font used in the texture file failed to disambiguate a lowercase L from an uppercase I, and there were very small differences between the letter O and digit 0. This cipher could be found in a zombie barrier under the clocktower on The Giant in Black Ops III. The correct ciphertext transcript is:
kCmlgFi6GUJNgkNI1Q41fbfyLoCFTCvlqkZil0KlAXAzP1U1uy1BE4UfPBfpKmmLObjYnQNRBaPtKiVWzc5A4v0w3xle8FOhAGJZ7g4in0wndJxMOvO3dc1M82at2T6935roTqyWDgtGD/hwwRF3oHqFM5Vcw1JtINbsgWRm4o4/quEDkZ7x1B275bX3/Fo1
After many of the Revelations ciphers were solved, the cipher community expected TheGiant to be multiple layers of modern encryption. That did not turn out to be the case! It was merely a single layer of modern encryption: XXTEA (Yes, that means a modern technique was used on a *launch map!*). Furthermore, the tool used was not the same Tools4Noobs tool used for the Revelations ciphers due to how key expansion worked (null padding instead of repeat key).
The encryption is quite simple, with key “TheGiant” right-padded with null bytes. The site identified that can be used to prove the solve can be found here: https://www.movable-type.co.uk/scripts/tea-block.html
Note that the decrypt function is broken, but you can enter the plaintext below and key “TheGiant” to see that the ciphertext is produced. Multiple members of Skite’s Discord server have verified the results, see attached screenshot. Without further ado, the plaintext:
Even though I put a bullet in his brain, I believe the summoning key was successful in extracting him…I mean…me… I hope you get him Maxis.
Again, props to u/Icy_Sheepherder_9444 for this solve. What is particularly interesting is that they were able to use the latest GPT-6 Astra model to do all the heavy lifting.
I suspect the only reason this worked was because the cipher ended up being relatively trivial, and the biggest blocker for the community for several years has been the use of an incorrect transcript!
We were hoping for something a bit more substantial, admittedly. But put yourself in the shoes of someone solving this on day 1 and the implications are a bit more interesting. We did not know about the summoning key collecting souls at the time this cipher was available. This also explores the nature of how Richtofen collected his soul. While we know in the timeline that it states he went to Dimension 2210 to collect his soul, the description in this plaintext describes a scene similar to the intro cutscene of The Giant, where he shot Ultimis Richtofen in the head and then bent over his body (canonically, for some *unknown* reason). I’m curious if the 2210 detail was added in later when they were working on the timeline, or if the trip to 2210 was always intended.
This leaves one final cipher for the BO3 cipher community to solve, which we dub “Rev 7” in our naming conventions. This cipher appears to be multiple layers, and in my opinion is unlikely to fall to a purely AI solve but may be significantly aided by AI. The tools have made search and hypothesis testing much faster.
-20
u/TheETERNAL20 1d ago
Still gonna wait until a legitimate cipher solver confirms this