title: Reverse Engineer a File Format
body: <p>This is my first attempt at reverse engineering, and really, I don't know how to go about it. I have a procedural kind of mind and no foundation of knowledge on popular encryption methods.</p>
  
  <p>But, it seems to me, if I have the very minimum data in the correct format, and know that there is an occurrence in the data of a certain word, or words, and where that word begins and ends in the data - that I could somehow discover the method of decrypting the entire file.</p>
  
  <pre><code>----- ENCRYPTED -------------------------------------------
  HEX     44 5E 12 47 55 5E 53 17 4C 5C 49 4F 4F
  ACII    D  ^  ?  G  U  ^  S  ?  L  \  I  O  O
  DEC     68 94 63 71 85 94 83 63 76 92 73 79 79 
  BIN     01000100 01011110 00111111 01000111 01010101 01011110 01010011 00111111    01001100 01011100 01001001 01001111 01001111
  ----- DECRYPTED -------------------------------------------
  HEX     74 6F 20 74 61 6B 65 20 74 65 73 74 73
  ASCII   t  o     t  a  k  e     t  e  s  t  s
  DEC     116 111 32 116 97 107 101 32 116 101 115 116 115 
  BIN     01110100 01101111 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01100101 01110011 01110100 01110011
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is just a sample of data. I know where the title information starts and ends because I examined two files with different titles - so I know these translate to the correct words - but where do I go from here to identifying the encryption process?</p>
  
  <p>*<em>I know people will ask why: This is from a VCE (exam) file format and I want to translate this into XML or JSON. This would make it easy for me to write a program that compares questions and answers from multiple exam files, append, remove duplicates, and create new ones. *</em></p>