Enigma 4 - Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher Mystery Cache
Enigma 4 - Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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Enigma Series No. 4 uses the Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher, first described in the Kama-Sutra ! No. 45 of 64 arts for women to study was "The art of secret writing".
You are looking for a 1L lock lid plastic food container with a few goodies inside.
Introduction:
This is a series of 25+ goecaches which I am deploying, the theme is codes, ciphers and cryptology. My inspiration comes from the Enigma machine, used by the German military during World War II and the efforts taken by the Polish, British and other allies to break the German secret codes used for military communications. It is widely believed that breaking Enigma shortened World War II by apporximately 2 years. Imagine if that did not happen, we would either be speaking German now or dead under a nuclear cloud....a sobering thought. This series of caches starts with simple codes and ciphers and moves forward to Enigma and state-of-the-art cryptology. If you like this series then I suggest two things: (1) Visit Bletchley Park (www.bletchleypark.org.uk) and (2) Read the book which I found most interesting: "The Code Book" by Simon Singh.
Bletchley Park employed 12,000 personnel at it's peak with everyone sworn to absolute secrecy until 1972, incredible that not once did the Germans suspect such an intelligence operation was ongoing in UK, even the top ranking British military were not aware of it's capabiliites, only Winston Churchil himself. Military commanders were fed information by miltary liasion officers that came from tangeable "second sources" such as spies, prisoner interrogations, etc. It was so important that Churchill signed a warrant stating Bletchley Park would get all resources necessary above and beyond any other cause during World War II!!
When most people talk about "secret codes" they quite often mean "secret ciphers". A few words to explain some commonly used terms:
Steganography - hiding or concealing a message.
Cryptography - scrambling a message.
Transposition - shifting the cipher characters.
Substitution - replacing pieces of the message with other characters.
Code - replacing or substituting words.
Cipher - replacing or substituting letters.
The Cipher:
This geocache will be using the Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher, first described in the Kama-Sutra ! No. 45 of 64 arts for women to study was "The art of secret writing".
The first documented use for military communications was in the era of Julias Caesar. Basically the cipher takes pairs of letters from the alphabet at random and then substitutes each letter in the message with it's partner.
Let us split the alphabet into random pairs, here's an example of how to cipher a message using this scheme:
ABCFGHLMPRSUX
VWNZIYDOJKTEQ
"I LOVE GEOCACHING AND CYCLING" would translate to "G DMAU IUMNVNYGCI VCL NHNDGCI"
For the code breakers, a typical method to resolve the cipher key would be to count the most used letters and work them out through their frequency of use, thus some of the letters could be guessed and these would be put into the unciphered message to try and find matches for words or parts of words. Of course, this relies on there being a lot of words for the frequency analysis, otherwise a short message might give you a random frequency pattern and lead to false leads. This method was used when the Arab Abbasid dynasty (c. 750AD) invented cryptanalysis and moved a step forward. They used relative frequencies of letters to help decipher messages. i.e. in the English language, 'e' is the most used letter, followed by 't' and 'a'....
In that same example above, you can also see that the "G" at the beginning could be guessed as "I" or "A", no other letters really make sense on their own. The 3 letter cipher word "VCL" might be something like "AND", "THE", "BUT", "YOU", etc.
The Geocache:
So now we'll use the same cipher to provide our co-ordinates for the ENIGMA 4 geocache, here you go:
Cmksy zgau mcu luikuut zgau tgq lungovd zgau cgcu tuauc Buts fukm fukm luikuut fukm tgq lungovd zmek ugiys ugiys
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Onfr bs svefg gerr nybat gur genpx.