Research Ciphers II Mystery Cache
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Size: 
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This is yet another in the series of cipher caches in Research Park. I hope this one shows you a couple of new (or at least some different spins on) interesting ciphers and a bit about their places in history! I'm going to take it easy on you guys, for the sake of the history lesson, and tell you what ciphers are in use, so it should be a snap working them out!
It's amazing to think how far cryptography has advanced in the last 100 years. It fascinates me to go back and look at some of the ciphers and codes that were used by various countries in the (recent) past and how they were 'state of the art' or unbreakable ciphers and now, just a few decades later, a java applet running in a web page can break them in seconds... And with the advent of quantum cryptography/computing and the like, our cryptosystems of today will be just as weak in the years and decades to come. The coordinates (accurate to within about 10-15') for the cache are enciphered with two different types of ciphers described below with a little bit of history about that cipher mixed in. --North Coordinates-- During World War I, the German military often used a double columnar transposition cipher to encipher or encrypt their communications. This system was regularly solved by the French, naming it Übchi, who were typically able to find the key in a matter of days after a new one had been introduced. However, the French success became widely-known and, after a publication in Le Matin, the Germans changed to a new system on 18 November 1914. During World War II, the double transposition cipher was used by Dutch Resistance groups, the French Maquis and the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), which was in charge of managing underground activities in Europe. It was also used by agents of the American Office of Strategic Services and as an emergency cipher for the German Army and Navy. The North coords will be enciphered using this (basically) same double columnar transposition cipher; however it will also use the concept of the Myszkowski variant form of columnar transposition, proposed by Émile Victor Théodore Myszkowski in 1902. (Research this as it is important to solving the cipher) Until the invention of the VIC cipher, double transposition was generally regarded as the most complicated cipher that an agent could operate reliably under difficult field conditions. To find your keys words to decrypt this double transposition cipher, look on the left hand side of the back of a US$1 note and look for the two words that appear above the eye and the pyramid - these are your keys. Important Note: You should remember the 'first in, last out' system for decrypting and encrypting this text with multiple keys... If I read left to right on the back of the dollar note (and I did) and I enciphered the text with both the words, you should think about the order I went in and the order you need to go in... I want to avoid unneeded frustration by you working the puzzle and then figuring out during the second round of deciphering that you did it wrong... (since the first set of plain text you decipher won't be readable even if you did it right) Cipher Text: NRHUNHRDOENTRYDTEEOEYGTNHETERDTSRHIERTNOWFITDOTSRYEOEFVU --West Coordinates-- The ADFGVX Cipher was also used by the German Army during World War I. This cipher was restricted to German High Command communications between and among the headquarters of divisions and army corps. ADFGVX was in fact an extension of an earlier cipher called ADFGX. Invented by Colonel Fritz Nebel and introduced in March 1918, the cipher was a fractionating transposition cipher which combined a modified Polybius square with a single columnar transposition. The cipher is named after the six possible letters used in the ciphertext: A, D, F, G, V and X. These letters were chosen deliberately because they sound very different from each other when transmitted via Morse code. The intention was to reduce the possibility of operator error. Nebel designed the original ADFGX cipher to provide an army on the move with encryption more convenient than trench codes but still secure. In fact, the Germans believed the ADFGVX cipher was unbreakable. The West coordinates are enciphered in a standard ADFGVX cipher; the encrypt/decrypt table I used is below (from wikipedia so it is common and easy to find): - A D F G V X A 8 P 3 D 1 N D L T 4 O A H F 7 K B C 5 Z G J U 6 W G M V X S V I R 2 X 9 E Y 0 F Q The Key word needed to decipher the transposition portion of this cipher is the fourth (4th) state that appears on the top row of states' names on the Lincoln Memorial's upper frieze on the front of the memorial - (Which US currency note would have this on it?...). (On an unrelated note these are the names of the 36 states that existed in the US at the end of the US Civil War) One weakness of a 'Caeser' based Cypher cipher is that is does not hide the frequency of the letters that appear in the natural language (which is an exploitable weakness in a cipher algorithm). It just changes the symbol used for the letter. ADFGVX Cipher overcomes this by replacing a single letter with a pair of letters then scrambling the pair with a single columnar transposition. Cipher Text: DFVV XVAG DXVD DDGG GAGX GGDD XVXG XVVG XXDD DXXV DDVX DGDD AVXV DGAD VDVG VFVG DXGG DVGV DDDA GVAA VXVV AXDV DDFV DXDV FXGV XADD DV ---------------------------------------------------- Good Luck! And I hope you take the time to learn how these ciphers work and a little bit about them! :) Please, no spoilers in the logs - spoiler logs will be deleted; I will send you an email letting you know so you can re-log your smiley with out the spoiler info. Let everyone work as hard as you did to find this one! :) You will be looking for a small camo'd locking box near by, big enough for a few geo-coins but not TBs (unless they are really tiny - it's a pretty small box) - BYOP - (See? It's not even big enough for a pen lol). If you are creative you can technically park ~40 feet from the cache, and dash across the road. Congrats to Turrell2, DivisibleBy3, and GCDragonfly on the FTF! My other Research Park Cipher caches nearby include: Research Ciphers! (GC2Y6XY) (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=26b900f0-7deb-47fa-9ae6-471c4969e2ea#) LeGrand Doesn't Play Fair (GC2XAEX) (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=48139628-eb5d-479d-9324-44853e14c8d5#)
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ab gurfr nera'g fgrry - gurl'er gur erny barf...
Treasures
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