[ubuntu-uk] Reverse engineering data files

[Gareth France]

Sounds good. The tricky bit is they seem to have encrypted the results 
themselves.

On 24/11/14 17:52, Paul Sladen wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Nov 2014, Gareth France wrote:
>> www.cliftonts.co.uk/SSS
>> the possibility of being given the design specs and signing a
>> non-disclosure agreement.
>
> I wouldn't bother waiting nor risk the complications arising from
> signing an agreement.  You're doing something for the purposes of
> interoperability, and the format seems so simple---running:
>
>    strings SSS
>
> gets you most of the content;  viewing the file itself with:
>
>    hexdump -C SSS | less -S
>
> It appears records are 180 bytes each.
> Each record starts with 0xae and ends with 0xff.
> Most strings appears to be a 16-byte fixed width, and zero-padded.
> 'I010000022S12111' is just a text-string; you should be able to match
> up to what was displayed on-screen the meaning of each character.
>
> The only binary data I can see is
>
>     0b 2c 03 06 07
>
> Which I presume is hour, minute, day, month, year+2007; so in this
> case:
>
>    11:44 3 JUN 2014.
>
> For figuring out the test string itself, I suggest you engineer a
> number of 'failures' and see what changes between each one.
>
> Hope that helps!
>
> 	-Paul
>
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