Enigma 5 - Caesar Shift Cipher Mystery Cache
Enigma 5 - Caesar Shift Cipher
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(regular)
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The co-ordinates are NOT for the cache, just somewhere fairly close to the final location.
Enigma Series No. 5 uses the Caesar Shift Cipher described below.
You are looking for a relatively LARGE container, a 5L lock lid, plastic food container.
Parking is possible about 100 yards along the track, next to the road.
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 cache uses the Caesar shift cipher. Basically you shift the cipher alphabet by a certain number of characters. Note Geocaching.com hints use a shift cipher of 13 characters !! This is different to the "Monoalphabetic Substitution Cipher" in that the letters are sequenced, so in a way is an easier cipher to consider. However, the code breaking metohds remain the same, it always seems easier when you know how to cipher and de-cipher the message, not so easy as the code breaker because you do not know which method was originally used...
If you know the Caesar cipher shift is being used then de-ciphering is simply a case of converting letters from the bottom row into the top row of the letter table.
Let's take an example where we shift by 10 characters:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
KLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHIJ
"I LOVE GEOCACHING AND CYCLING" would translate to "S VYFO QOYMKMRSXQ KXN MIMVSXQ"
The Geocache:
So now we'll use the a different Caesar shift cipher to provide our co-ordinates for the ENIGMA 5 geocache, you have to work out what that shift is. To make it even harder I will re-arrange the co-ordinates somehow but it should be obvious once you get the correct cipher table. Here you go:
gocd joby csh nomswkv psfo yxo yxo wsxedoc xybdr psfo yxo noqbooc gocd joby joby noqbooc xybdr psfo cofox nomswkv psfo cofox osqrd wsxedoc
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Uvag 1 - Whfg cvpx gur svefg jbeq naq gel qvssrerag fuvsgf...
Uvag 2 - Onfr bs ebggra fghzc.