Cipher Clock

[Mattyrat2027]

@Madness I did try that to no avail if my method is correct but I will try again. Am I right (and are you allowed to tell me?) that I need to work out the patterns of one letter in the unkeyed encryption of the crib and find if a letter patterns matches that in the ciphertext?

@Bubba Thanks I will try that. As it happens I stumbled across 1 bigram that does not occur in the ciphertext aside from double letters.

Thanks you all.

[Petertompkin]

Apart from double letters (of which there are none in the cipher text), there is also at least ONE other character that each of the 28 in the cipher text is NEVER followed by – think what that would mean about the position of those characters on the cipher wheel – and if you can find all the “missing combinations, you’ll hopefully find that there is only one possible order for all the characters on the cipher wheel, reducing you to just 28 possible starting set ups 🙂

[Mattyrat2027]

@Bubba

Thanks you so much for giving me that tip. I have exploited that weakness and have reached the (hopefully) one ciphertext alphabet that I hope to be the only one.

Thanks again.

[Madness]

@mattyrat2027, the whole crib has to fit in such a way that a mono substitution is possible.

[Harry]

THe cryptanalysts at BOSS have posted a new report on analysis of the clock cipher. You can find it in the case files. Good luck, Harry

[Mattyrat2027]

@Bubba, @Madness, @Everyone:
Thanks to all who gave me tips, I contacted my team for help with some coding, and we finally reached success, cracking 7B.
Thanks you all.

[Bubba]

@mattyrat2027 Well done! I am very pleased for you. Use the techniques that you have acquired, maybe develop your coding skills/speed for next year’s challenge (the cipher one not the Covid-19 one!). 🙂

[Mattyrat2027]

@anyone_who_happens_to_know, now the Cipher Challenge is drawing to a close, is it all done until next year, or are there other mini-challenges set throughout the year?

(Harry – I know I’m far too late but Codeword: Elite)

[Maigret]

Well the third technical report has been published and very useful via the crib method. We see clearly that N pairs with C but surely # pairs with Q both ways, maybe one needs a longer section for consistency.

[Petertompkin]

🙂

[Madness]

Who has managed to recover the keyword?

[17maswania]

I have found the cipher alphabet and know how to decrypt the text but I cannot find a way to automate the process. I know there is a way other than programming but am yet to discover it. Any help would be much appreciated!

[Harry]

You can automate this lots of ways. The cleanest is to pick up the basics of a programming or scripting language like python (and there is a lot of help with that here on the site) but you could even do it using lookups and formulae in Excel (I know because I tried it). All the best, Harry

[Mattyrat2027]

@Madness I know the cipher alphabet and the decrypt, but I can’t find the key just yet. I am also working on your challenge from the other forum, but my cipher alphabet isn’t working.

[F6exb]

@Madness

Who has managed to recover the keyword?

I think that the code word format is alphabetically: E A C D E B F G. But my english is too poor to find the word.
And your’s: B D A E G D H F C (That matches with the hint of Tsyzygy in #52776).

[Author]

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