Ernst S. Selmer, a Norwegian mathematician after which the "Selmer
group" has been named, is by no means well known, even though he
has been credited with constructing the format of the Norwegian
equivalent of social security numbers ( personnummer )
http://www.matematikk.org/pub/mattetekst/Persnr/
However, he has also contributed significantly to crypography
and Norwegian military intelligence. One can only presume that many
of his contributions remain secret even to this day.
This cache is a tribute to Ernst Selmer, where by using modern
cryptographic tools, no codebreaking is neccesary, you can unravel
some of Selmers secrets.
The hunt starts close to "Folkeregisteret", the norwegian cencus
office, where every resident of Norway still is indexed by the same
person-number system that Selmer devised in the 60s. At this
location you can find a small inscription made by me. The
inscription is over 10 characters long and works as the key that
you will need to decrypt the following PGP encrypted message. I
suggest you download GPG from
http://www.gnupg.org/ to
decrypt the following message:
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32)
jA0EAwMC3BhfDSvhTA9gycCWJowWZtjBZ4Y+mqSPpp29dfz8VdjZuUpMRTUu6tO+
3RY0QCo3L9Te33o2B2WYrLhAIhAlMeCHJAYOUvZefBr23qagOPapevv5/fMidwJh
uF1gCCzigFFj0XzgFosJRQMrmpyiaB6c0P+6J3bMVU9BkgiQeSxhD5TUiLDlHjls
XcrxLWYnjwW9vn9VKBUydj0uWk3ELxFfw/uj1hpG7uwy3KHG2YxoEdWJ3MAj1r01
gQKHCIMurNP/JnwZXxY8kNyuwF3apxpL3KBMbC3v8Mpaum95G4KotZ/wy1kzG41n
j2JEy/N7+ZSFtnpb+nY764iWyKh9b/zXdFF3OC7min/BArRoSe3GtGTNk8fZUM1l
yZrU4BcCRcKvHf1jFzxGYwll+MIUO99gHFdGbsI7SanTgwRvQhW4KCV0EzyRsbnw
1Do90bcccCT01u+V8cYbwxYWToW7mXgh
=m5+U
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
Copy the above text, inluding the lines with ----- into a file
called stage1.txt.asc, and decrypt the file, you can use "gpg -d
stage1.txt.asc" on the commandline, or the graphical userinterface
if the file has the correct name. Note: all letters in the password
are upper case. ( kun store bokstaver )
NB!The quest has a few stages, and can most likely not be
completed in a single day.