VENONA Mystery Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The cache is not at the posted coordinates. Those coordinates however are an excellent parking area within 0.5 miles of the cache. The cryptograms below will provide you with the actual coordinates.
The 'One Time Pad' (OTP) is a cryptographic system in which a plain text message is enciphered by a random key of the same length as the message. If the key is truly random and is used only once, the message is perfectly secure (i.e., The plain text can not be recovered by any cryptanalystic means).
While perfect security would seem to be a highly desireable feature of any cipher system, the OTP has several practical problems which makes it's wide scale use difficult. Creating the encryption keys in quantity usually requires the use of machines. Since machines are designed by engineers, it is possible under some circumstances for another engineer to reverse engineer the design and reproduce the keys at will. Further, the publication and distribution of the keys provides an opportunity for a foe to obtain them through clandestine means such as burglary or bribery (AKA 'Forensic key recovery'). Lastly, if the keys are used more than once, the messages become subject to cryptanalytic attack and decryption.
Historically, all of these methods have been used at one time or another to defeat OTP systems. During World War II, the FBI is said to have conducted burglaries of Soviet facilities in part to obtain OTP keys. During this same period, the US Army Signal Security Agency (SSA) was able to solve the German Foreign Office OTP system because the keys were determined by analysis to not be completely random. In an even greater accomplishment, British cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park were able to reconstruct the German Lorenz stream cipher teletype without ever having seen the machine. This was made possible by a German transmission error which allowed the recovery of the plain text and keystring of a single message. Subsequent analysis of the keystring allowed the British to deduce the internal workings of the machine.
The greatest success occurred beginning in the late 1940's when US and UK intelligence agencies were able to read much of the OTP traffic sent by Soviet Intelligence agencies. This was made possible by the Soviet reuse of numerous OTP keys, a serious blunder! This material, codenamed VENONA, was a valuable source of information on Soviet espionage efforts in the US.
To find this cache, you will have to duplicate (in a small way) this achievement of the Venona cryptanalysts. Provided below are two Vigenere enciphered OTPs. Both messages have been deliberately enciphered with the same random key.
MSG No. 1
SMXZJ LLLZP KEHTA RPDRI DJYWH RGWIA VKGTL
BJVPJ ERYJC VDNCT WWSUT MRWEV ILLUE TQWGV
MSG No. 2
DSSDN LMAOW VIHKD YZALF RTOKP TFFIN ASPGZ
MKWFS OOYQY HVXMV IUIKT ZYKUD KJACJ WDJHP
Feel free to send me E-mails with questions concerning this cache. As with all my puzzle caches, I encourage you all to work in teams to solve it and/or to exchange hints with other cachers.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Sbe gur pvcuref: Fvapr gur zrffntrf zhfg vaibyir pbbeqvangrf, jevggra ahzoref (r.t., Guerr) fubhyq or pbzzba va gur cynva grkg.
Sbe gur pnpur: Uvag rapvcurerq va pelcgbtenz.