Secanon here
5 rows, 24 columns -120 squares
3 color possibilities per square -each square can encode log_2(3) = 1.585 bits of information
120 x 1.585 = 190.2 bits of information can be encoded in that stripe
There cannot be a lot of things stored in there.
For instance, if you code a message with alphanum characters (upper-case and lower-case letters, plus numbers), you have 25+25+10=60 different possibilities per character.
That corresponds to log_2(60)=5.9069 bits of information per character.
So 190.2 bits of information encoded with alphanums would require 32.1997 characters, or, as there is no such thing as a fractional character, there could not be more than 32 alphanums encoded in this.
If you only consider lower-case characters, you're talking about a 190.2/log_2(25) = 40.9573 characters, i.e. 40 lower-case characters.
If you only consider decimal numbers, you get 190.2/log_2(10) = 57.2559, i.e. 57 decimal numbers at most.
However, 190.2 bits of information could still be a strong decryption key for something else. By strong, I mean that something encrypted with a key with 190.2 bits of entropy (ignore the mathematical term), means that thing cannot be decrypted by brute-forcing all the possibilities for the key.
So here you have it:
-
if it encodes a message, it's not a message with a lot of information
-
if it's a key, you would need to find what it could decrypt
Last thing, how do you convert that stripe into a key? Idea:
This is a base 3 number with 120 base 3 digits. You have to assign the values 1, 2 and 3 to the 3 colors.
There are 6 ways of doing that. More specifically, if a, b and c are the 3 colors, the possibilities are:
123
abc
acb
bac
bca
cab
cba
Then, you would have to chose how to read the sequence:
-
by rows?
-
by columns?
-
from left to right?
-
from right to left?
-
from top to bottom?
-
from bottom to top?
That yields 8 possibilities of ordering the squares.
All in all, you could extract 8x6 = 24 base-3 numbers with 120 base-3 numbers.
From that, you could convert all these 24 numbers to base-2, or to base-16 (hexadecimal), and you would have 24 possible decryption keys.
I wouldn't hold my breath that it could lead to something, but if you wanted to try it, that's how I would start.