Cipher Alpha Mystery Cache
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(micro)
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Introduction
The "Alphabet Cipher" series of geocaches is designed to give
experience in hand solving simple transposition ciphers. All the
caches will be
micro and attached to, or in, man-made structures however unlike
the previous series the terrain rating on this series will be
easier.
The initial series will include alpha, beta, gamma and delta and
will represent ciphers of
increasing difficulty and are best attempted in order.
Substitution Ciphers vs. Transposition Ciphers?
As seen in the previous cipher series substitution ciphers are made
when the letters of the plain text message are converted to a
cipher text by substituting them other letters or symbols.
Transposition ciphers on the other hand rely on rearranging the
existing letters in some pattern.
Example
Plaintext: Have you found the cache?
Step 1, rearrange into a rectangle:
h a v e y
o u f o u
n d t h e
c a c h e
Step 2, read off the cipher text in the opposite direction, in this
case in columns from top to bottom:
h o n c a u d a v f t c e o h h y u e e
Step 3, put into blocks of 5 or 6:
honca udavf tceoh hyuee
Cracking transposition ciphers
The first stage is to count the length of the cipher text and
determine the sizes of the rectangle used.In the above example we
can count 20 letters. The non-trivial factors of 20 are 2,4,5 and
10 and so the square could have been 2x10 or 4x5. It is unlikely
that a narrow rectangle has been used and so the most obvious size
is 4x5. The cipher text can now be written out in this pattern and
examined for any words.
Example
From the above cipher text we have (4x5):
h u t h
o d c y
n a e u
c v o e
a f h e
or (5x4)
h a v e y
o u f o u
n d t h e
c a c h e
The plain text can be clearly seen in the second choice.
The cipher for Cipher Alpha is
tuwne htoot ehroe voyri fnifp
eenet niari oinei ytubt figst
gteec ytnho hhwis dfytt uitog
eeoto strfp hvf
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Lbh whfg xabj guvf frevrf vf tbvat gb trg uneqre qba'g lbh?
Treasures
You'll collect a digital Treasure from one of these collections when you find and log this geocache:
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