Lolcat Steganography: Find the message hidden within the transport medium of humorous feline photography

Question

lolcat

The Bad Guys (curse them!) have begun communicating in lolcats, to enable their Internet communications to take place unnoticed.
This is a job for the NSA/GCHQ crack team of cryptanalysts.
Unfortunately they're a bit busy today, so you'll have to do it.
A secret message is concealed in the lolcatstream above.
It's a pencil-and-paper cipher. You do not need a computer to decipher it.
All the information you need is above the horizontal line. These instructions (everything below the horizontal line) do not contain hidden information.
From HUMINT assets, you have received the Bad Guys' code book. You know for certain that the message above consists entirely of one of the following code words:

YODA (meaning "Your cover has been blown!")

LUKE (meaning "Get me Tom Cruise's autograph!")

LEIA (meaning "Explode the enormous bomb on Tuesday!")

FISHCAKE (meaning "Send more food!)

DURANCE (meaning "Give yourself up to the police!")
Summary (just for clarity). There is a hidden message in the lolcats above. It consists of one of this set of words: YODA, LUKE, LEIA, FISHCAKE, DURANCE. Your task is to discover which of those words the message consists of. Please explain your answer.

It's been a few days and nobody's cracked it, so here's a clue (if you need it):

Cats like bacon.

One problem with this puzzle is my short term memory.I always have to scroll up and down and never hold on to what I have just seen... — BmyGuest, Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 19:30
Question: Are all the spelling mistakes deliberate? Am I right in thinking that the hint limits the number of "useful" lol cats in the puzzle? — BmyGuest, Commented Nov 30, 2014 at 19:34
I think you had a good puzzle idea but could have executed it more cleanly. There were too many red herrings and noise compared in the images and text to the amount of signal. Limiting to purely white and purely dark cats would have helped. The bacon clue was good, but came too late -- there are many possible encodings, and the correct one needs to stand out. Finally, there could be more of a thematic link between lolcats, bacon, and the Star Wars characters. A series of images of pigs would clue bacon better, and you have full leeway to control the answer word. — xnor, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 7:01
@AE One part I didn't like about the puzzle (I loved the idea!) was the fact that it was hard to read visually due to very differently sized images. I think the puzzle would have been better (presented) if the images would have been resized. — BmyGuest, Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 16:44

Aioros · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-01 11:33:47Z

19

Well, I finally figured it out (thanks to the hint, of course).

The hint is "Cats like bacon", which means that

the message is encoded with a Baconian cipher.

In this case, we need to figure out

the binary distinction in the images upon which the encoding was based.

The characteristic used to encode the message is

the color of the cats: a fully-white cat is B, others are A.

So the encoded message is:

ABABA BAABB ABAAB AABAA

Which translates to

L U K E

answered Dec 1, 2014 at 11:33

Aioros

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$\begingroup$ HOORAY! Correct answer. Well done. :) $\endgroup$
– A E
Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 11:37
1

$\begingroup$ Ah, good one. My distinction between a & b (not realizing the pun of the hint) was "bacon" = cats with and without mouth open... Well, id didn't give a word of the list... $\endgroup$
– BmyGuest
Commented Dec 2, 2014 at 16:41

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