Cryptography - The study and practice of concealing information.
Dating back thousands of years, there are countless records and studies on cryptography and cryptanalysis. Password cracking, encoding/decoding, substitution ciphers, prime numbers with hundreds of digits, and complex and repeated algorithms. The study of ciphers is by no means a lost art, and truly fascinating.
Cipher - The algorithm used in encrypting a message.
Rather than having you look up random facts, or guess obscure information about me, I thought we could learn a little bit about basic cryptography through practice.
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, will be to calculate the key used in this cipher, and use a simple algorithm (picture based actually, but you could do it mathematically) to decode an encrypted message.
Simple Rules:
- This contest is open only to members of this pass, but if others want to try it and pm me the answer, maybe I can have a side drawing for non pass members. We'll see just how strong your google-fu is.
- Members of this pass are free to post their answers or progress at any point.
- First public answer wins.
- I will answer questions, but only if you convince me that you truly don't understand what I am asking.
- For the sake of order, I will likely make edits to this post as necessary.
To start:
Take my birthday in the form MMDDYYYY
Convert each individual digit into its binary form (For example; 1 in binary is 1, 2 is 10, and 3 is 11...)
You should now have have a string of 16 ones and zeroes
Separate the 16 bits into a first half, and a second half.
You should have 8 ones and zeros on each side.
Convert each half back to a decimal form. They should come out as 3 digit numbers.
To find the key, take the first letter of each digit, you should have a key of 6 characters.
For example, if you got results 123 and 456 .. the key would be ottffs.
one,
two,
three.. .etc
Use this Table(link), and a search for how a Vigenere Cipher works (can't just hand it to you... :whistling: )
The message to
decode is
ZBUSVLNIECEDNKBV
All spaces are excluded.
Prize
Well telling you is no fun... It will be special, I promise.
Good Luck!