A Lesson In Ciphers # 10 Mystery Cache

This cache series is designed to give you an introduction to the world of ciphers. It will not cover every type of cipher out there, instead focusing on a small variety of different ciphers. Hopefully, you will walk away from solving this series with a new set of puzzle solving skills. And maybe, just maybe, you'll be able to go to that puzzle that's always bothered you and begin to see it with a new pair of eyes.

I have designed this series such that you will not be able to solve them all in one swipe. How you may ask? Outside of the first two caches, all of the caches in the series will require clues left within previous caches. I recommend that you keep track of these clues, and which cache they were found within, as you work your way through the series. That information will be useful even after you solve the cipher it is used with. On to the cache.

You've reached the end. This is the final lesson. What else could you possibly learn about ciphers? A lot more than you might think. By now, your brain has probably been picked to the core as you search for how I have done my ciphers. You've probably seen more methods for enciphering text than most will ever know exist. Let's see how all of that research has benefited you.

For your final lesson, I thought that I would end by pointing out how ciphers have advance in the modern age. Many of the more secure classical ciphers used lengthier messages and more complicated methods of substitution and transposition to encipher information. As they became more advanced, it required more time to both encipher and decipher the message. This added another level of security.

In the last century, advances in technology began to decrease those times as we developed equipment to aid cryptology. This brought about the advance of rotor machines, and finally computers, into the field. While ciphers had a start in politics and war, today they are also commonly used by software companies to encrypt information. With the increasing capabilities of computers, it should be no surprise that ciphers have gotten increasingly difficult. A lot of modern ciphers developed through the work of Horst Feistel, a German who worked for IBM in the 70's doing research in data encryption. Every computer in the world uses methods based on his pioneering work. With the advance of modern ciphers, ciphers can now be broken down into three groups: classical, modern, and rotor machines (the Enigma Machine from WWII is a famous example of this).

Modern ciphers can often make classical ciphers seem easy, but how they are solved looks anything like easy. Many employ the use of algorithms to both encrypt and decrypt text. In other words, your high school math class is probably not going to give you the knowledge needed to even scratch the surface most modern ciphers. Method's for enciphering become less important as the type of key (symmetrical or asymmetrical) and the type of data to be inputted (block or stream) become the deciding factor in the type of modern cipher used.

However, with all the advances in cryptology throughout history, the goal of cryptology is still the same, to encrypt information. After finishing these lessons, you will now have a better understanding of the variety of ways this goal can be achieved.

To solve the final cipher, employ a key found in a previous lesson to decrypt the following message and learn where you need to go to complete this lesson:

As always, be careful of muggles and try to rehide this exactly as you found it. Parking is nearby.

Need a refresher on a previous lesson? Here's the complete list (updated as the lessons become available):