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This is honestly so sad…we accidentally didn’t take out double letters when trying different keywords…so it was all messing up cos of this little error. And now we’ve missed the deadline of today :((
I do not like being sent on a wild goose chase! Dear Uncle Wilhelm makes no sense, just ask my fingers which now need a massage/manicure!
Can someone give us a little clue or something to find the key? We don’t wanna give up since we’ve written a program to solve it once we’ve entered the key and that took time and all…but ugh, we can’t work out what it is for the life of us. I’m still thinking about the “D NT IS REQUIRED K” anagram from last week…but I’ve tried NT as part of the key (“n, a, c, e, g, i” etc.) and DNT (same way) and it didn’t work so I dunno, maybe it’s a red herring or I’m misinterpreting it? I’m pretty desperate lol – I’ve even tried NorfolkTirpitzufer to make up the key.
Honestly, we’d be fine as well if we just knew the first few words of the deciphered code but, since this one isn’t to Wilhelm, I don’t know how one would find it! On that topic, I know we were given some of the plaintext but I don’t understand how that can be of use when it isn’t from the start & we don’t know where it is in the text. Can we actually use that to find the key?
My brain is about to say bye bye because of this blasted clock cipher, I dent even know the the letters line up. I really doubt if I will be able to solve this before the deadline. Please help Harry.
@Xantali you are not going to be able to guess the key, as it suggests in the case files the key is constructed from some kind of pattern but they are not sure how. With a key length of 28 there are 28! different keys, simply too many to bruteforce. I would suggest your time would be better spent figuring out how to figure out the key rather than taking stabs in the dark. Good luck!
@Xantali, the hidden message from last week was “TNT IS REQUIRED”.
Counting digrams sounds like a good idea. Who thought of that?
@Teymour_aldridge I would certainly be interested in an explanation on how to solve it without a crib
I just checked the case files and I feel like such an idiot. Apparently the word stop didn’t mean that the crib stopped after tential. I spent way too long decrypting 7B only knowing that tential was in it and because of this missed the first deadline. I don’t know how I managed to be that stupid. With that long a crib it should of been much easier. Although I suppose that does show that even with a much smaller crib it is still possible to break (just with a lot more brute force).
How to extract polygrams (bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, …) with a spreadsheet. (French Excel)
• Copy the cipher text in A1.
• In A10 ===> 1.
• In A11 ===> 3 or 4 or 5 or … (if you want bigrams, trigrams, tetragrams, …).
• Select A10 and A11.
• Extend vertically .
• In B10 ===> “=STXT( $A$1;A10;2 or 3 or….).
• Extend.
• Select polygrams range and copy it on the right for example D10.
• Sort the range A ===> Z.
• In E10 ===> =NB.SI(D10:D……….;D10).
• Extend.
• Now, with “find” in column E, you look from start to bottom for 8 occurrences, 7, 6, ….The key looks so random. Maybe Harry should tell us how it was generated.
[How about you take a guess? Harry]
[Edited by Harry] is there any way the process can be sped up as currently, it would take many, many hours? [Yes, there is definitely a way to speed it up! Does that help? Harry]
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