Category: Tutorials

Today we’re launching a new tool to help find keywords in passcodes.

https://regex.ingress.codes

It works the same way like the other one on the Internet but it’s actually updated!

How to use the finder

Transposition

Sometimes you just want to know what keywords are possible to help spot a pattern in a code. For example:

te68o5erezim2tk8uf

The regular expression to find a possible keyword would be:

^[te68o5erezim2tk8uf]{8}$

The ^ and $ denote the beginning and end of a string, essentially a whole word.

The [te68o5erezim2tk8uf] denotes to look for a character within the [].

The {8} tells it to look for 8 of those characters, since the prefix/suffix are 5 characters each, there are 8 remaining for the keyword.

Trying this example out reveals the keyword to be timezero, and we can now look for the full passcode:

te
68
o5
er
ez
im
2t
k8
uf

timezero can be seen highlighted and we see a pattern for the passcode: ufk82timezero568te.

Substitution

If a code presents itself with a clean distribution and a correlation between letters/numbers, you can sometimes use the tool to find a keyword.

a8bdacc6ccbbbaabbabcabb6b0b1ccccccaab0 would be split into pairs:

a8 bd ac c6 cc bb ba ab ba bc ab b6 b0 b1 cc cc cc aa b0

The pairs starting with c are in the same position as where numbers go, and you can now safely assume everything in the middle is a keyword.

bb ba ab ba bc ab b6 b0 b1

Looking for repeated sets, we see that ba and ab are repeated in the keyword. Creating a regular expression for it:

^.(.)(.)\1.\2...$

The . not enclosed in () denote any character we don’t generally care about.

The (.) are captured to be reused in another part of the expression with \1, \2, etc., in the order in which they were captured.

With our example, we see the only result being detection. If we compare the (uppercase) hexadecimal values of detection to the code:

bb ba ab ba bc ab b6 b0 b1

44 45 54 45 43 54 49 4f 4e

We can now deduce the code was ciphered with a hexadecimal-atbash.

57 42 53 39 33 44 45 54 45 43 54 49 4f 4e 33 33 33 55 4f

WBS93DETECTION333UO