This is youtube's 500 page. I wonder if someone knows how the 'information' is encoded. It is not base64. Does anyone know how to decode it.
http://paste.pm/raw/dme
Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
1–10 of 21 posts
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#2Why do you assume it is not base64 encoded? I have always come to believe it is some encrypted data. If I was Google I would probably give every server a UUID and a symmetric key. If an error occurs encrypt (and authenticate) the stacktrace and other debug information with that symmetric key and prepend the UUID. As a developer you can then find out the server that produced the error message, log in via SSH and decrypt the debug information.
But it would be interesting to collect a lot of this error messages to check if they appear to be completely random.
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#3An analysis of this can be found here:
http://www.cambus.net/decoding-youtube-http-error-500-messag...
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#4[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#5Why do you assume it is not base64 encoded? I have always come to believe it is some encrypted data. If I was Google I would probably give every server a UUID and a symmetric key. If an error occurs encrypt (and authenticate) the stacktrace and other debug information with that symmetric key and prepend the UUID. As a developer you can then find out the server that produced the error message, log in via SSH and decry…
They change completely on every load. Encoding would likely have similar sections between page refreshes, as it doesn't we can assume your theory of encrypted data is correct. It makes sense anyway, it means they can have a user supply a stack trace or similar without exposing any information to them.
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#6It is non-standard base64: it uses '_' and '-' instead of '+' and '/'. You can read in Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#7Why do you assume it is not base64 encoded? I have always come to believe it is some encrypted data. If I was Google I would probably give every server a UUID and a symmetric key. If an error occurs encrypt (and authenticate) the stacktrace and other debug information with that symmetric key and prepend the UUID. As a developer you can then find out the server that produced the error message, log in via SSH and decry…
They change completely on every load. Encoding would likely have similar sections between page refreshes, as it doesn't we can assume your theory of encrypted data is correct. It makes sense anyway, it means they can have a user supply a stack trace or similar without exposing any information to them.
Actually the first few characters remained the same with page loads.
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
They change completely on every load. Encoding would likely have similar sections between page refreshes, as it doesn't we can assume your theory of encrypted data is correct. It makes sense anyway, it means they can have a user supply a stack trace or similar without exposing any information to them.
Actually the first few characters remained the same with page loads.
CBC mode AES?
Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#9Using Python 3.3:
import base64
base64.urlsafe_b64decode(s)Re: Ask HN: Decode Youtube 500 page
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually the first few characters remained the same with page loads.
CBC mode AES?
More likely a header. It's 3081 byte blob after base64 decoding. If we consider it's encrypted with some block cipher with 128 or 256-bit blocks (IV and/or MAC would be likely to be 128-bit, too), there are 9 bytes for some header and/or padding.