⇥ Challenge 2.0 goes unresolved!
It looks like I might have aimed a little too high for my second challenge—which has gone unanswered.
The result was actually relatively simple to resolve. The encrypted cypher contained a long word—SGDWPALBKCTXH—which was the key to the entire thing. The only word of 13 characters in that blog post was “sophisticated,” which, given the starting point should have given would-be solvers a starting clue.
In reality, the encryption mechanism was a simple addition cypher in which the zero-based alphabetical position of each letter (i.e.: A=0, B=1, etc.) was replaced with the sum of itself plus the preceding letter (excluding spaces).
The solution could therefore be obtained by reversing the process—for example with a simple algorithm like this:
$code = “SGDWPALBKCTXH LVQHIH LA LAPA JZLGOP”;
echo $code[0];
$offset = ord(‘A’);
$prev = ord($code[0]) – $offset;
for ($i = 1; $i < strlen($code); $i++) {
if (‘ ‘ === $code[$i] ) {
echo ‘ ‘;
continue;
}
$letter = ord($code[$i]) – $offset – $prev;
if ($letter < 0) {
$letter = $letter + 26;
}
$prev = $letter;
echo chr($letter + $offset);
}
This gives the final solution: “SOPHISTICATED INDEED IS THIS RIDDLE”.
Comments
Cool, I was going in the right direction!
I took the 13 letter word and managed to find out it was the key. Since it had 13 unique letters, I first thought it was a mirror crypt, where the remaining 13 letters of the alphabet would be the replacement values. That yielded giberish. So I wrote a script that took all the words of 13 letters from a dictionary site, filtered the ones that had only one occurance of each letter, and used those as a key to decrypt.
The flaw obviously is that in my filter, I watched for only 13 letter words where each letter occurs only once, while sophisticated contains 2 i’s and 2 t’s.
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