No logarithms or book cyphers, or anything super complex. It’s an alphabetic cypher, and I’m guessing that you guys can crack it with only a small amount of effort.
To sweeten the deal, I’ll pretend that the public here intercepted my key to the cypher. The usage of the key needs to be figured out, but again it’s not really that hard to do.
I can give hints periodically, and answer a small amount of yes/no questions.
I suppose if there’s no interest in this idea, the thread will drop like a hot stone and disappear. I would understand if that happened, but I’d be surprised if there were nobody that wanted to at least try to solve it.
My undercover agent was abducted shortly after visiting a dead-drop that was perhaps poorly chosen. He ingests his cyanide pill, and dies quickly. In his pocket you recover a not that reads as follows:
2292184162116127101429155231323426181715102
sick lump hi phat phew narcon ail perk pro
If there’s any interest in this, I’ll provide hints as needed and I’ll answer any yes/no questions truthfully. Limit one question per person per day.
Question nullified. You get another for today.
Keep in mind that there are a few really simple turns involved in solving this. The level of complexity is such that I could explain the key to a teenager in a few sentences. No complex math at all.
Maybe the key is supposed to be parsed as a series of numbers in the range 1 to 26, to map to letters of the alphabet? Trouble is, there are many ways of doing that. If you assume that the key represents a permutation of the alphabet, and that there are no leading zeroes, it could be
[SPOIler] You get 26 numbers if you reverse the large number provided in the OP. This results in 4 possible ciphers, because you don’t know where it should be 17 versus 1 then 7, and 24 versus 2 then 4. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to use that cipher to decode the message.
I’ve tried replacing the text with numbers (A-1… Z-26, and A-26…Z-1), and then looking the corresponding number up on each of the ciphers, but none work. I’ve tried replacing the text with numbers from my cipher, and then looking up the corresponding number on a A-Z:1-26, and A-Z:26-1 scale, but that doesn’t work either. I’ve also tried looking for two letter words 1 number apart (corresponding to HI in the code), and then adjusting for the difference between 8-9 (corresponding to HI again), but none work. I did the same thing for 19-18 (HI on the A-Z:26-1 scale.
Here is a very rough percentage chart. And some very rough coding.
Freq letters in ciphertext (%) Freq of letters in English (%)
A 9 8
B 0 2
C 6 3
D 0 4
E 6 13
F 0 2
G 0 2
H 9 6
I 9 7
J 0 0
K 6 1
L 6 4
M 3 2
N 6 7
O 6 8
P 15 2
Q 0 0
R 9 6
S 3 6
T 3 9
U 3 3
V 0 1
W 3 2
X 0 0
y 0 2
z 0 0
[spoiler]Notice that there are only 2 0s in the pattern and 43 digits total.
If you take the number string 1 through 26, you would have only 2 0s and 43 digits total, so I think there’s an obvious connection.
Now, reading forward, both 0s are preceded by 1s, but reading backwards, the 0s are preceded by a 1 and a 2 each. So it’s reasonable to assume you need to read the string backwards.
Breaking apart the string where obvious breaks would occur, one gets:
This accounts for all the numbers from 1 through 26
*currently, there are two consecutive strings of 1 & 7, so which is 17 and which isn’t is as yet undetermined
**ditto the two consecutive strings of 2 & 4
Given these two uncertainties, there are four different combinations of letters that are possible:
(1) T O A G R P X C W M Y E S B D J Q U F K Z N H L I V
(2) T O Q R P X C W M Y E S B D J A G U F K Z N H L I V
(3) T O A G R P B D C W M Y E S X J Q U F K Z N H L I V
(4) T O Q R P B D C W M Y E S X J A G U F K Z N H L I V[/spoiler]
That’s all for now…