Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by verroq 5490 days ago
I don't think so, it'd take way too long to dictionary attack/bruteforce the missing 64 x 9 characters of the blurred image. Which gives 64 ^ (64 x 9) combinations judging from the base64 encoding.

That is assuming you have the blurring algorithm and font perfect.

2 comments

No - we already know that the same blurring algorithm was used for all the characters. The font can be found and matched quickly and you only need to calibrate the blur for one character. The blurring algorithm will give you a pixel perfect representation for character match so its more on the order of 64 * 600 (600 is the approx number of chars blurred). This could be cracked in a day or less by someone motivated enough.
How do you know that blurring one character produces the same effect as blurring two characters close together?
You don't need to know this. You make an image of the text for every combination possible, apply the blur algorithm, and see which one is a pixel-perfect match for to the image on the web site.

Or rather, you don't do this, you write a program to do it :)

But you'll have to go through 64 ^ (64 x 9), combinations which will take years which was what I said in the first post.
What prevents you from doing it with only 5 letters at a time?