Enigma Series - 6 - Keyword Cipher Alphabet Mystery Cache
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Enigma Series - 6 - Keyword Cipher Alphabet
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Difficulty:
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Terrain:
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Size: 
(small)
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The co-ordinates are NOT the final location but the centre of Wallintgton, you should be able to park somewhere nearby.
There are lovely views over the Baldock area countryside.
Another ENIGMA cache, this one uses a keyword for the substitute alphabet.
Bring gloves or a stick, there are a lot of stinging nettles around here !!
Enigma Series - Enigma 6 - Keyword Cipher Alphabet
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:
Here we will use the Keyword [or key phrase] cipher alphabet. You can start cipher alphabet with a known keyword [you can only use any letter once], then continue with unused letters from the rest of the alphabet, typically following on from the last keyword letter. The keyword doesn't have to be at the start, especially if the first letter of the cipher alphabet is 'a'. However, in our example here [and the one for the cache location] we will put the keyword at the start, i.e. we might decide to use "BALDY BAZZER" as our keyword [without the space].
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz --> BALDYZERSTUVWXCFGHIJKMNOPQ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
BALDYZERSTUVWXCFGHIJKMNOPQ
"I LOVE GEOCACHING AND CYCLING" would translate to "S VYFO QOYMKMRSXQ KXN MIMVSXQ"
The Geocache:
So now we'll use a different keyword cipher alphabet to provide our co-ordinates for the ENIGMA 6 geocache, you have to work out what that keyword is, then the rest of the letters and use this sequence to decipher the message. I'll make it deliberately more difficult by removing all the spaces between words ;-)
Here you go:
UVYBNHPHBLVUACAIYAAZHPHBLUPUACAOPTGSBJVHPFABJVJAZBMAYVMAYVCAIYAAZMAYVZAFAUCAOPTGSHPFABNYAAUPUA
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Pelcgb Uvag: Erzrzore gb hfr gur yrggref bs gur xrljbeq bayl bapr. Xrljbeq vf bar bs gur sbyybjvat: ONEEL, PLPYVAT, JNYXVAT, EHAAVAT, TRBPNPUVAT, ONYQLONMMRE, PNZCVAT be UVXVAT.
Pnpur Uvag: Tebhaq yriry ng evtug fvqr raq bs byq zrgny tngr.